Should governments direct research and development (R&D) away from “dirty” technologies towards “clean” ones? How important is this compared to carbon pricing? We address these questions with the introduction of two model features to the literature on directed technological change and the environment. We introduce decreasing returns to R&D, and allow future carbon taxes to influence current R&D decisions. Our results suggest that governments should prioritize clean R&D. Dealing with major environmental problems requires an R&D shift towards clean technology. However, in the case where most researchers are working with clean technology, both productivity spillovers and the risks of future replacement increase. Consequently, the gap between the private and social values of an innovation is greatest for clean technologies.
The density of fuel filling stations influences consumers' utility of private car transport. We investigate the technology choice of firms and consumers in a formal model of the private transport market. Two competing technologies exist; today's internal combustion engine based on fossil fuels, and tomorrow's hydrogen car. Due to network externalities, several market equilibria may exist, of which one is likely to Pareto dominate the other(s). Thus, a lock-in situation is possible. On the other hand, if either the costs of establishing hydrogen filling stations are too high or the hydrogen car technology is still in its infancy, the only equilibrium is the current internal combustion engine equilibrium. Hence, apart from internalizing the environmental externality on gasoline cars, the government has no reason to intervene before the technology is ripe.
Building on agency-theoretical perspectives of public bureaucracies, we argue that politician–bureaucrat preference alignment can have important implications for bureaucrats’ pay. We study such private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians using detailed data on all 1,632 top administrators active in all Norwegian municipalities over a period of 25 years (1991–2015). Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician–bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of top bureaucrats ran for political office. We focus explicitly on individuals at the very top of the administrative hierarchy and are able to separate the intensive margin (i.e., wage increases) from any additional effects at the extensive margin (i.e., new appointments). Using close elections for inference in a regression discontinuity analysis, we find that politician–bureaucrat alignment significantly increases top bureaucrats’ wage even in the Norwegian civil service system. This has important implications also from a theoretical perspective. Our results indeed go against predictions from models with policy-motivated bureaucrats, but are consistent with politically aligned principal–agent matches being more productive.
Welfare and growth impacts of innovation policies in a small, open economyAn applied general equilibrium analysis Abstract:We explore how innovation incentives in a small, open economy should be designed in order to achieve the highest welfare and growth, by means of a computable general equilibrium model with R&D-driven endogenous technological change embodied in varieties of capital. We study policy alternatives targeted towards R&D, capital varieties formation, and domestic investments in capital varieties. Subsidising domestic investments, thereby excluding stimuli to world market deliveries, generates less R&D, capital formation, economic growth, and welfare, than do the other alternatives, reflecting that the domestic market for capital varieties is limited. Directing support to R&D rather than to capital formation generates stronger economic growth, a higher number of patents and capital varieties, and a higher share of R&D in total production. However, it costs in terms of lower production within each firm, where presence of sunk patent costs and mark-ups result in efficiency losses. The welfare result is, thus, slightly lower.
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