What is the optimal system of intellectual property rights to encourage innovation? Empirical evidence from economic history can help to inform important policy questions that have been difficult to answer with modern data: 1) Does the existence of strong patent laws encourage innovation? And 2)...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a project-based carbon trade mechanism that subsidizes the users of climate-friendly technologies and encourages technology transfer. The CDM has provided financial support for a large share of Chinese wind projects since 2002. Using pooled...

Commercial real estate plays a key role in determining the urban sustainability of a metropolitan area. While the residential sector has been the primary focus of energy policies, commercial buildings are now responsible for most of the durable building stock's total electricity consumption....

From 1990 to 2008, the real value of US manufacturing output grew by one-third while the pollution emitted from US factories fell by two-thirds. What accounts for this cleanup? Prior studies have documented that a relatively small share can be explained by changes in the composition of US...

R&D is an uncertain activity with highly skewed outcomes. Nonetheless, most recent empirical studies and modeling estimates of the potential of technological change focus on the average returns to research and development (R&D) for a composite technology and contain little or no information...

The introduction of the U.S. SO2 allowance-trading program to address the threat of acid rain as part of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 is a landmark event in the history of environmental regulation. The program was a great success by almost all measures. This paper, which draws upon a...

We track US imports of advanced technology wind and solar power-generation equipment from a panel of countries during 1989-2010, and examine the determining factors including sector-specific US FDI outflow, country size, and domestic wind and solar power generation. Differentiating between the...

Recent efforts to endogenize technological change in climate policy models demonstrate the importance of accounting for the opportunity cost of climate R&D investments. Because the social returns to R&D investments are typically higher than the social returns to other types of investment, any...

The achievements in agricultural innovation over the past century have been impressive, supporting large increases in agricultural yields and low food prices. Critical to this success has been sustained public sector investment combined with a decentralized and competitive research system in the...

Total pollution emitted by U.S. manufacturers declined over the past 30 years by about 60 percent, even though real manufacturing output increased 70 percent. This improvement must result from a combination of two trends: (1) changes in production or abatement processes ("technology"); or (2)...