Knowledge spillovers from clean and dirty technologies

Antoine Dechezleprêtre, Ralf Martin and Myra Mohnen

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: How much should governments subsidize the development of new clean technologies? We use patent citation data to investigate the relative intensity of knowledge spillovers in clean and dirty technologies in two technological fields: energy production and transportation. We introduce a new methodology that takes into account the whole history of patent citations to capture the indirect knowledge spillovers generated by patents. We find that conditional on a wide range of potential confounding factors clean patents receive on average 43% more citations than dirty patents. Knowledge spillovers from clean technologies are comparable in scale to those observed in the IT sector. The radical novelty of clean technologies relative to more incremental dirty inventions seems to account for their superiority. Our results can support public support for clean R&D. They also suggest that green policies might be able to boost economic growth through induced knowledge spillovers.

Keywords: Innovation spill-overs; Climate Change; Growth; Patents; Clean technology; Optimal climate policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H23 O30 O54 O55 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 83 pages
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ene, nep-env, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-res and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (45)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60501/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Knowledge Spillovers from clean and dirty technologies (2017)
Working Paper: Knowledge Spillovers from Clean and Dirty Technologies (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:60501

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