Innovation and Climate Change Policy

By Joshua S. Gans. 2012

123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines whether climate change policies will induce innovation in environmentally friendly technologies. The model demonstrates that a tighter emissions cap will reduce the scale of fossil fuel usage and that this will diminish incentives to improve fossil fuel efficiencies. In addition, such policies may stimulate the relative demand for innovations that improve the efficiency of alternative energy but carbon scarcity may diminish innovation incentives overall. Only for technologies that directly abate carbon pollution will there be an unambiguously positive impact on innovation. These results have implications for climate change targets and the design of climate change policy. (JEL O31, Q54, Q55, Q58)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd194d26702c85f901d515fda314f76dc5846d58

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Sjak A. Smulders
2. Cees Withagen
3. E. Werf
4. Corrado Di Maria

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. Sjak A. Smulders
2. Cees Withagen

Citations in the corpus

• Going Green in China: Firms’ Responses to Stricter Environmental Regulations (2019, unknown): “…effects (Acemoglu, Akcigit, Hanley and Kerr, 2016; Aghion, Dechezleprêtre, Hemous, Martin and Van Reenen, 2016; Gutiérrez and Teshima, 2018; Aghion, Bénabou, Martin and Roulet, 2019), while some others find negative ones (Nelson, Tietenberg and Donihue, 1993; Gray and Shadbegian, 1998; Gans, 2012).”
• When Does Labor Scarcity Encourage Innovation? (2010, unknown): “Recent work by Gans (2009) provides a theoretical explanation for the Porter hypothesis using the framework presented here.”
• Does Environmental Regulation Indirectly Induce Upstream Innovation? New Evidence from India (2017, unknown): “Studies have examined not only the direct impact of environmental regulation on technical change (Gans, 2012) but also its indirect effects (Calel and Dechezlepretre, 2012; Perunovic and Vidic-Perunovic, 2012; Miller, 2015).”
• The Environment and Directed Technical Change (2012, unknown): “More recently, Gans (2009) develops a two-period model based on Acemoglu (2009b) to discuss the Porter hypothesis, that environmental regulation can lead to faster technological progress (see also Rauscher, 2009).”
• Growth Theory and "Green Growth" (2014, background): “…for the possibility of “Directed Technical Change” (DTC) based on the relative economic rewards from the different types of innovation (e.g., Smulders and De Nooij, 2003; Hart, 2008; Grimaud and Rouge, 2008; Di Maria and Valente, 2008; Gerlagh, 2008; Gans, 2011; Andre and Smulders, 2014).”