Disentangling the greening of the labour market: The role of changing occupations and worker flows

Using a text-mining approach applied to task descriptions of occupations together with workerlevel administrative data, we explore the growth in the greenness of employment in Germany between 2012 and 2022. We first demonstrate that the greening of the labour market occurs both through an increase of green tasks and a decrease of brown tasks. Furthermore, the greening of occupations over time ("within-effect") is at least as important for the overall greening of employment as shifting occupational employment shares ("between-effect"). Second, we show which occupations and which task types (brown or green) contribute most to the within-effect, and which worker flows are mainly responsible for the between-effect. Third, we investigate individual-level consequences of the greening of employment. We find that the employment prospects of foreign and of low-skilled workers are most at risk from the green transition, which may therefore increase existing labour-market inequalities.