The environmental cost of the international job market for economists

Olivier Chanel, Alberto Prati and Morgan Raux
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Morgan Raux: uni.lu - Université du Luxembourg = University of Luxembourg = Universität Luxemburg

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Abstract: We provide an estimate of the environmental impact of the recruitment system in the economics profession, known as the "international job market for economists". Each year, most graduating PhDs seeking jobs in academia, government, or companies participate in this job market. The market follows a standardized process, where candidates are pre-screened in a short interview which takes place at an annual meeting in Europe or in the United States. Most interviews are arranged via a non-profit online platform, econjobmarket.org, which kindly agreed to share its anonymized data with us. Using this dataset, we estimate the individual environmental impact of 1057 candidates and one hundred recruitment committees who attended the EEA and AEA meetings in December 2019 and January 2020. We calculate that this pre-screening system generated the equivalent of about 4800 tons of avoidable CO2-eq and a comprehensive economic cost over €4.4 million. We contrast this overall assessment against three counterfactual scenarios: an alternative in-person system, a hybrid system (where videoconference is used for some candidates) and a fully online system (as it happened in 2020–21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Overall, the study can offer useful information to shape future recruitment standards in a more sustainable way.

Keywords: Job market for economists; International job market; Carbon footprint; Environmental impact; Comprehensive economic cost (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-hme and nep-sog
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://amu.hal.science/hal-03778777v1
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Published in Ecological Economics, 2022, 201, pp.107565. ⟨10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107565⟩

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Related works:
Working Paper: The environmental cost of the international job market for economists (2022)
Working Paper: The environmental cost of the international job market for economists (2021)
Working Paper: The environmental cost of the international job market for economists (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03778777

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107565

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