Environmental Preferences and Technological Choices: Is Market Competition Clean or Dirty?

BÃ©nabou, Roland, Philippe Aghion, Ralf Martin and Alexandra Roulet
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Roland Benabou

No 14581, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper investigates the joint effect of consumers' environmental concerns and product-market competition on firms' decisions whether to innovate "clean" or "dirty". We first develop a step-by-step innovation model to capture the basic intuition that socially responsible consumers induce firms to escape competition by pursuing greener innovations. To test and quantify the theory, we bring together patent data, survey data on environmental values, and competition measures. Using a panel of 8,562 firms from the automobile sector that patented in 42 countries between 1998 and 2012, we indeed find that greater exposure to environmental attitudes has a significant positive effect on the probability for a firm to innovate in the clean direction, and all the more so the higher the degree of product market competition. Results suggest that the combination of historically realistic increases in prosocial attitudes and product market competition can have the same effect on green innovation as major increase in fuel prices.

Keywords: Environment; Social responsibility; Climate change; Innovation; Competition; Patents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 D22 D62 D64 H23 O3 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ene, nep-env, nep-ino, nep-res and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

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