The frequency, duration and intensity of ‘climate extremes’ have dramatically increased over the last 5 years in a scenario that is becoming the ‘new norm’. This poses unprecedented challenges for the labor market as workers employed in sectors that are more exposed to weather variability will face additional on-the-job risks deriving from external factors. These workers are also likely to deal with heavier physical efforts, to be immigrants, more health-vulnerable and with weaker labor market attachment, this also raises distributional concerns. A clearer understanding of environmental factors would help policy makers improve the job safety and quantify the costs associated with the local manifestation of climate change externalities. This project contributes to fill this gap by empirically investigating the role of environmental factors in affecting workplace safety in Italy. It considers two relevant margins of analysis: the risk associated with environmental factors (on accidents, injuries and workers’ health), and the costs for both private firms and the society. Both outcomes are analyzed using unique administrative data on work-related accidents aligned with granular environmental data. Accidents data contains detailed information on firms as well as workers’ and injuries’ characteristics, which also allows for a rich heterogeneity analysis of the distributional effects. The analysis relies on state-of-the-art econometric methods for causal identification strategies.

We are looking for a master student with a great an enthusiasm for economic research, with good time management and attitude for team working. The ideal candidate should have an intermediate background of environmental and health economics, and an intermediate level of econometric skills. Moreover, a good command of statistical software for data manipulation and analysis (Stata or R) will be a key asset.

The research will be carried out within the Social Sciences Area (SSA) of GSSI located in L’Aquila, with a period of 6/12 months at the Department of Medicine, Epidemiology, Occupational and Environmental Hygiene (DMEILA) of INAIL. The GSSI-SSA team is made up of about 20 researchers actively involved in the GSSI mission of carrying out frontier research, and offers a 4-year International PhD Program. The candidate will interact with PhD students of the house and top-scholars in climate change economics who will be actively involved. Together with scholars from other GSSI areas, the synergy with INAIL will also allow the candidate to benefit from a truly interdisciplinary environment.