Occupational mobility and climate adaptation: Evidence from France

The extent to which climate change will exacerbate already growing inequality between workers is an open question. Little is known about how occupational mobility might mediate climate change’s effects on inequality. High mobility rates between high exposure and low exposure occupations would mitigate inequality between the two, though increased labor supply to certain low exposure occupations could depress their wages. Well-documented frictions to occupational mobility, especially between occupations with different task requirements, suggest that this adaptation strategy may be highly costly to many workers. Using 9.2 million observations from individual-level panel data from France, I find that historically, inter-exposure mobility rates are low. Despite high exposure jobs making up only 9% of the labor market, a worker leaving a high exposure occupation moves to a different high exposure occupation 49% of the time. The task composition of high exposure jobs provides a partial, but incomplete, explanation for this labor market segmentation.