I theoretically and empirically show that dismissal laws - laws that impose hurdles on firing of employees - spur innovation and thereby economic growth. Theoretically, dismissal laws make it costly for firms to arbitrarily discharge employees. This enables firms to commit to not punish...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in 'Industry and Innovation', 2011, 18(3), 317-334.<P> This article presents a model of sequential decisions about investments in environmentally dirty and clean technologies, which extends the path-dependence framework of Arthur (1989). This allows...</p>

This paper studies the effects of uncoordinated environmental tax policies on firms’ incentives to form bilateral R&D collaborations. It is shown that the complete network is pair-wise stable for small differences in the taxation of environmental emissions. Larger tax differentials may induce...

Since governments can influence the demand for a new abatement technology through their environmental policy, they may be able to expropriate innovations in new abatement technology ex post. This suggests that incentives for environmental R&D may be lower than the incentives for market goods...

Since governments can influence the demand for a new abatement technology through their environmental policy, they may be able to expropriate innovations in new abatement technology ex post. This suggests that incentives for environmental R&D may be lower than the incentives for market goods...

Geoengineering, i.e. the use of artificial techniques aiming at cooling the planet, is increasingly considered as a realistic alternative to emission mitigation. Several methods are promising for their capacity to quickly halt global warming at a moderate cost. Such cheap technologies might be...

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...

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 topic of this note is issues related to R&D expenditures leading to improved technologies for reducing environmentally harmful emissions. The focus is on the following questions: Will a market economy where environmental policies are restricted to taxes or quotas give the socially efficient...

The notion of dynamic, endogenous diversity and its role in theories of investment and technological innovation is addressed. We develop a formal model of an innovation arising from the combination of two existing modules, with the objective to optimize the net benefits of diversity. The model...