Impact of Climate Policy on Labor Earnings: Evidence From Low‐Carbon City Pilot Policy in China
利用中国低碳城市试点政策作为准自然实验，研究发现气候政策整体上提高了劳动收入且未损害就业，但加剧了技能和行业间的收入不平等，对低技能劳动者不利。
ABSTRACT This paper use China's Low‐Carbon City Pilot program as a quasi‐natural experiment, combining city‐level data with the China Labor Dynamics Survey (CLDS) data to empirically examine the impact of climate policies on labor earnings in the aggregate labor market. Our findings reveal that climate policies have a significant positive impact on earnings in the overall labor market without adversely affecting employment. However, climate policy has substantial distributional effects, favoring skilled workers in green industries but disadvantaging low‐skilled labor. This distributional effect primarily stems from the industrial restructuring and technological upgrading in cities induced by climate policies through administrative regulations and economic incentives. Furthermore, our research indicates that the effects of climate policies on the labor market extend to the household level, raising certain social distributional concerns.