Emissions tax and second-mover advantage in clean technology R&D

Soo Keong Yong () and Stuart McDonald ()
Additional contact information
Soo Keong Yong: Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, 2018, vol. 20, issue 1, No 5, 89-108

Abstract: Abstract This paper shows that under an emissions tax regime where firms have heterogenous capabilities in clean technology R&D, firms can acquire technology developed by rival firms at a lower cost than developing the technology in-house. In anticipation of such second-mover advantage in R&D, this creates an investment disincentive for technological innovators and resulted in lower social welfare relative to the case where firms’ technological competencies are homogenous and knowledge spillovers are equally shared. To resolve, the government can award a targeted subsidy, instead of a standard uniform subsidy, solely to the innovator to seed research.

Keywords: Clean technology R&D; Emissions taxes; One-way R&D spillover; Second-mover advantage; Targeted subsidy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 H23 L51 Q55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10018-017-0185-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:spr:envpol:v:20:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s10018-017-0185-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... mental/journal/10018

DOI: 10.1007/s10018-017-0185-6

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies is currently edited by Ken-Ichi Akao

More articles in Environmental Economics and Policy Studies from Springer, Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - SEEPS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().