Can directed technical change be used to combat climate change? We construct new firm-level panel data on auto industry innovation distinguishing between "dirty" (internal combustion engine) and "clean" (e.g. electric and hybrid) patents across 80 countries over several decades. We show that...

Using a general two-stage framework, this paper gives sufficient conditions for increasing competition to have negative or positive effects on R&D-investment, respectively. Both possibilities arise in plausible situations, even if one uses relatively narrow definitions of increasing competition....