The Political Economy of Environmental Technology Developments in the United States

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three chapters that investigate specific aspects of the political economy of environmental technology developments in the United States. It begins with a theoretical perspective of constrained political decision-making on environmental regulations, followed by an empirical analysis of anticipatory investment decisions, and a policy evaluation related to environmental technology.

The first chapter explores how a political party with a pro-environmental agenda can encourage a polluting firm to invest in clean technology, especially when there are voters who care about the environment. I find that there is a feasible range of effective regulations that can be used to make adopting clean technology a profitable choice. When the firm adopts clean technology, it benefits the environmentally conscious voters, who in turn, vote for the pro-environmental party.

The second chapter studies how environmental policy divergence at the US state level affects the development of environmental technology. I find that pro-environmental policies and the anticipation of the same encourage innovation, beyond the natural trend in environmental innovation in those states – owing to the environmental preferences of the electorate, and the state's dependency on fossil fuels.

In the third chapter, I explore the role of the Green Technology Pilot Program, inducted by the US federal government in 2009, to boost the growth of environmental technology. I measure the effect of the program on the quantity and quality of the patents in the environmental technology domain, to find that there has been a positive impact on the quantity of patents in the given field. Yet the effect on quality, measured by citations, remains ambiguous