Environmental regulation and innovation in renewable energy technologies: Does the policy instrument matter?

Erik Hille, Wilhelm Althammer () and Henning Diederich

VfS Annual Conference 2019 (Leipzig): 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall - Democracy and Market Economy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: We examine how different renewable energy support policies affect innovation in solar and wind power technologies. The analysis is conducted using policy and patent data for a large sample of 194 countries and territories. The policy data allows distinguishing two dimensions of regulation, i.e. design and intensity, and their effects on innovation. The patent data is based on the new Y02E system and covers the period 1990 to 2016 with the more recent years of both strong increases and declines in patenting activity. The results show that, first, more intense portfolios of renewable energy support policies increase patenting in solar- and wind-power-related technologies. Second, this inducement effect is the strongest for public RD&D programs, targets, and fiscal incentives. In contrast to previous studies, this paper finds a consistently positive impact of feed-in tariffs and does not detect technology-specific differences in the effectiveness of this policy instrument. Third, the positive effect on patenting activity increases significantly over time with an increase in the duration of the implemented RD&D programs and targets.

Keywords: Innovation; environmental regulation; renewable energy technologies; solar technologies; wind technologies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H23 O31 Q42 Q55 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/203482/1/VfS-2019-pid-25336.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Environmental regulation and innovation in renewable energy technologies: Does the policy instrument matter? (2020)
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:zbw:vfsc19:203482

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2019 (Leipzig): 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall - Democracy and Market Economy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().