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This paper investigates the determinants of directed technical change in the electricity generation sector. We use firm-level data on patents led in renewable (REN) and fossil fuel (FF) technologies by about 7,000 European firms over the period 1978-2006. We separately study specialized firms that innovate in only one type of technology during the sample period, and mixed firms that innovate in both technologies. We find that for specialized firms the main drivers of innovation are fossil-fuel prices, market size, and firms' past knowledge stocks. Also, prices and market size drive the entry of new REN firms into innovation. By contrast, we find that innovation by mixed firms is mainly driven by strong path-dependencies since for these firms past knowledge stock is the major driver of the direction of innovation. These results imply that generic environmental policies that affect prices and energy demand are mainly effective in directing innovation by small specialized firms. In order to direct innovation e orts of large mixed corporations with a long history of FF innovation, targeted R&D policies are likely to be more effective.

This paper investigates the impact of alternative environmental policy instruments on technological innovations aiming to improve energy-efficiency in buildings. The empirical analysis focuses on three main types of policy instruments, namely regulatory energy standards in buildings codes, energy taxes as captured by energy prices and specific governmental energy R&D expenditures. Technological innovation is measured using patent counts for specific technologies related to energy-efficiency in buildings (e.g. insulation, high-efficiency boilers, energy-saving lightings). The estimates for seven European countries over the 1989-2004 period imply that a strengthening of 10% of the minimum insulation standards for walls would increase the likelihood to file additional patents by about 3%. In contrast, energy prices have no significant effect on the likelihood to patent. Governmental energy R&D support has a small positive significant effect on patenting activities.

We study the conditions for the emergence of cooperation in a spatial common-pool resource game. We consider three types of agents: cooperators, defectors and enforcers. The role of enforcers is to punish defectors for overharvesting the resource. Agents are located around a circle and they only observe the actions of their two nearest neighbors. Their payoffs are determined by both local and global interactions and they modify their actions by imitating the strategy in their neighborhood with the highest payoffs on average. Using theoretical and numerical analysis, we find that a large diversity of equilibria exists in this game. In particular, we derive conditions for the occurrence of equilibria in which the three strategies coexist. We also discuss the stability of these equilibria. Finally, we show that introducing resource dynamics favors the occurrence of cooperative equilibria.

Conditions for the emergence of cooperation in a spatial common-pool resource game are studied. This combines in a unique way local and global interactions. A fixed number of harvesters are located on a spatial grid. Harvesters choose among three strategies: defection, cooperation, and enforcement. Individual payoffs are affected by both global factors, namely, aggregate harvest and resource stock level, and local factors, such as the imposition of sanctions on neighbors by enforcers. The evolution of strategies in the population is driven by social learning through imitation. Numerous types of equilibria exist in these settings. An important new finding is that clusters of cooperators and enforcers can survive among large groups of defectors. We discuss how the results contrast with the non-spatial, but otherwise similar, game of Sethi and Somanathan (1996).

Achieving the ambition of limiting global warming to 1.5°C to 2°C by the end of the century as enacted in the Paris Climate Agreement will require massive investments in environmental technologies and a forceful change of path away from high-carbon technologies. This report presents novel descriptive evidence on global trends in patenting in low-carbon technologies, with a particular focus on the energy and road transport sector. The analysis discusses the role of public policies in driving the rate and the direction of innovation for a low-carbon future.