Public or Private? Demand Shocks and the Market for Climate Experts

• In Event: Firm Politics in an Era of Climate Crisis

Abstract

Climate policymaking requires governments to have some access to climate experts: individuals with specialized knowledge of decarbonization and physical climate science. In this paper, we model the quality of climate policymaking partly as a function of competition between government regulators and private firms for a scarce pool of climate experts. Regulators seek experts to develop and enforce effective climate policies. Firms seek experts to affect the design of those regulations and skirt enforcement, as well as to measure climate-related risks to their commercial interests. We argue that as private sector interest in climate grows, the government’s ability to attract and retain climate experts declines, eroding its regulatory capacity. To offer support for this argument, we identify shocks to private sector demand for climate experts via a rich dataset on U.S. private sector job postings, which we then pair with administrative data on bureaucrats at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Our findings offer a novel labor-based account of the nature of climate policymaking, contributing to the study of labor markets in political science, the literature on the quality of government bureaucracies, and debates on the net effect of corporate social responsibility.

Authors

• Simran Singh

• Calvin Thrall, Columbia University

• Noah Zucker, London School of Economics