This paper provides new evidence on the workplace skills most relevant in the transition toward environmentally sustainable economies. Using a novel datadriven methodology, we identify two main sets of green skills, namely, engineering skills for the design and production of technology, and managerial skills for implementing and monitoring environmental organizational practices. Exploiting exogenous geographical variation in regulatory stringency, we also evaluate the effect of environmental regulation on the demand of green skills for a panel of US metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas over the period 2006-14. The main finding is that while these changes in environmental regulation have no impact on overall employment, they create significant, if modest, gaps in the demand for some green skills, especially those related to technical and engineering work tasks.

Eco-innovation is an explicit aim of major EU policy strategies. Many environmental policies de facto require firms to eco-innovate to comply with policy requirements, while the overlap between policy-driven and market-driven eco-innovation strategies is increasingly important for many firms. Barriers to eco-innovation can then emerge as a critical factor in either preventing or stimulating EU strategies, policy implementation, and the green strategies of firms. In this paper we focus on EU-27 SMEs. We single out and explore different firm profiles, considering eco-innovation barriers and engagement. Our analysis is based on a particularly suitable dataset: the Eurobarometer survey on “Attitudes of European entrepreneurs towards eco-innovation”. We identify six clusters of SMEs. These clusters include firms facing either ‘Revealed barriers’ or ‘Deterring barriers’, ‘Cost deterred’ firms, ‘Market deterred’ firms, ‘Non eco-innovators’, and ‘Green champions’. The clusters display substantial differences in terms of eco-innovation adoption. We show that our taxonomy has little overlap with sector classifications. This diversity should be taken into account for successful environmental and innovation policies

This paper discusses the results for Italy of a CDM model (Crepon et al, 1998) further extended with the objective of evaluating drivers and productivity effects of environmental innovations. The particular nature of environmental innovations, especially as regards the need of government intervention to create market opportunities, is likely to affect the way through which they are pursued (innovation equation within the CDM model) and their effect on productivity (productivity equation).Here I test two main hypothesis: (i) to what extent polluting firms rely on own innovations to improve their environmental performance? (ii) do the pursue of environmental innovations reduce the likelihood of obtaining other profitable innovations (crowding out)? Results, based on administrative data (AIDA by Bureau van Dijk and patent data from PATSTAT) show that innovation efforts of polluting firms and sectors is significantly biased towards environmental innovations and that environmental innovations tend to crowd out other more profitable (at least in the short run) innovations.