Younger generations express increasing concern for environmental sustainability, yet little is known about how sustainability considerations shape labour supply and worker sorting. We study the value workers place on green job attributes and the behavioural motives underlying these preferences. Using a preregistered discrete choice experiment with a representative sample of 2,008 Italian young adults, we estimate willingness to pay for environmentally sustainable job characteristics, including green products and production processes, environmental training, sustainability certifications, green fringe benefits, and sustainability-linked incentives. We find that workers are willing to forgo between 2% and 8% of monthly wages to obtain specific green job attributes, magnitudes comparable to those associated with established job amenities. To assess external validity, we link experimentally elicited preferences to actual educational choices and show that individuals with stronger green preferences are more likely to enrol in university programmes providing green skills. We further find that green preferences are strongly associated with prosociality, only weakly related to patience, and unrelated to risk tolerance. Our results identify environmental sustainability as a distinct dimension of job quality that may influence worker sorting and firms’ ability to attract talent.

With A. Marini and U. Rizzo. SSRN Working Paper.