"The political acceptability of climate policies is undermined by job-killing arguments, especially for the least-skilled workers. However, evidence for distributional impacts for different workers remains scant. We examine the associations between climate policies, proxied by energy prices and a stringency index, and workforce skills for 14 European countries and 15 industrial sectors over the period of 1995-2011. We find that, while the long-term decline in employment in most carbon-intensive sectors is unrelated to policy stringency, climate policies have been skill biased against manual workers and have favoured technicians and professionals. This skill bias is confirmed using a shift-share instrumental variable estimator."

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