Conference Agenda

Meeting decarbonisation targets requires rapid advancements in clean technology. While optimal climate policy theoretically requires R&D subsidies to spur this development, empirical evidence on their efficacy remains scarce. This paper evaluates the clean innovation outcomes of the European Union’s largest R&D framework. Focusing on grants specifically designed to promote clean technologies, I employ a Doubly Robust staggered difference-in-differences estimator to identify their effect on both green and general technological progress. I find that, on average, these grants do not stimulate innovation. However, among first-time patenting firms, funding increases general patenting activity, though not specifically in clean technologies. These findings suggest the program is ineffective at steering innovation toward the targeted green direction, lending support to current political discussions advocating for a change in the EU R&D approach.

Whether the energy transition will harm or benefit workers is a central policy concern. This paper provides the first ex-post estimates of transition costs when small and medium enterprises adopt clean technologies. I study heating service firms in France as they shift from installing fossil fuel boilers to heat pumps. Tracking workers through matched employeremployee data, I document substantial within-firm labor reallocation but low transition costs overall. While displaced workers recover their earnings within one year, stayers adjust by working longer hours. Hourly wages rise for those exposed early to the technology or facing smaller skill gaps, but primarily through employer changes rather than within-firm raises. These results demonstrate that market incentives can facilitate on-the-job skill updating, keeping adjustment costs low even amid significant labor reallocation.

On 29 January 2025, the European Commission unveiled the Competitiveness Compass, a set of policy guidelines highlighting the need to align industrial decarbonization and long-term competitiveness. Achieving this objective crucially depends on how firms' low-carbon innovations can translate into tangible emission reductions and efficiency gains. While existing literature recognizes the importance of innovation to develop or scale up low-carbon technologies, the link between firm-level green inventions and their real-world impacts on technological change, efficiency and emission levels has largely been overlooked. This paper investigates this relationship in the context of heavy industry firms regulated by the European Union Emissions Trading System from 2013 to 2020. In a first stage, efficiency and technological progress are assessed using a Technological Frontier Analysis, applied to emissions data from the EU Transaction Log and financial and operational data from ORBIS. In a second stage, a firm-level panel econometric model evaluates the effects of green patenting---measured using PATSTAT data---on firms' efficiency and technological progress. The results reveal that increases in non-low-carbon innovation are consistently associated with short-run efficiency gains and frontier advancement, reflecting incremental improvements in mature technologies. By contrast, low-carbon innovation is linked to technological progress only when embodied in new production facilities and over longer horizons, indicating that radical low-carbon innovation delivers larger but delayed efficiency gains.

Information technology (IT) holds immense potential for facilitating technical upgrading and green transition, yet the environmental implications of related public policies remain underexplored. Leveraging on a unique pilot program designed to foster IT penetration in the industrial sector, this study examines the impact of informatization incentives on the pollution emissions of industrial firms. We find that the program causes a substantial reduction in firm emissions, primarily driven by the technical effect. Moreover, the emission reductions are more pronounced among firms with medium-to-high productivity, loose credit constraints, and large size. A plausible mechanism underlying this cleanup is the increase in IT-related investments triggered by the program, which prompts firms to adopt more efficient and cleaner production processes, while concurrently enhancing their abatement efficiency. Alternative pathways, such as additional investments in abatement facilities or green technologies, appear negligible. Overall, this study sheds light on how informatization incentives reshape firms’ technology adoption, production processes, and emission behaviors, offering timely policy insights for industrialized economies navigating the dual mandates of digital and green transitions.