The impact of energy prices on socioeconomic and environmental performance:

The features of our data allow to contrast the impact of energy prices at both the establishment- and the firm-level and for multi- and single-establishment firms, and to identify the sectors and workers that are likely to be mostly affected by climate policies. [...] On the other hand, the direction of the bias is unclear for labour and depends on the relative magnitudes of the downward bias associated with unobservable demand shocks and of the upward bias related to the substitution of labour for energy. [...] Blocking the energy mix before the entry of the establishment in the estimation sample shuts down the influence of en- dogenous technical change that mostly operates through changes in the energy mix. [...] To mitigate the concern that forward-looking managers forecast the evolution of input-specific energy prices in the coming years and choose the energy mix in the year t accordingly, the pre-sample measure of the establishment energy mix is lagged by at least 3 years with respect to the first observation in which the establishment joins the estimation sample. [...] Overall, results highlight a positive effect of energy prices on the probability of exit, both in the probit and in the IV-probit models.24 To quantify the contribution of energy prices to exit, we compute marginal effects at the average energy price and evaluate the predicted increase in exit probability of driven by historical price changes or by the French carbon tax.