Climate change and labour-saving technologies: the twin transition via patent texts

Tommaso Rughi, Jacopo Staccioli and Maria Enrica Virgillito

LEM Papers Series from Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy

Abstract: This paper provides a direct understanding of the twin transition from the innovative activity domain. It starts with a technological mapping of the technological innovations characterised by both climate change mitigation/adaptation (green) and labour-saving attributes. To accomplish the task, we draw on the universe of patent grants in the USPTO since 1976 to 2021 reporting the Y02-Y04S tagging scheme and we identify those patents embedding an explicit labour-saving heuristic via a dependency parsing algorithm. We characterise their technological, sectoral and time evolution. Finally, after constructing an index of sectoral penetration of LS and non-LS green patents, we explore its impact on employment share growth at state level in the US. Our evidence shows that employment shares in sectors characterised by a higher exposure to LS (non-LS) technologies present an overall negative (positive) growth dynamics.

Keywords: Climate change mitigation technologies; Labour-saving technologies; Search heuristics; Natural Language Processing; Labour markets. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-03-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-lma and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lem.sssup.it/WPLem/files/2023-11.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ssa:lemwps:2023/11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LEM Papers Series from Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).