Environmentally-Responsible Households : Irresponsible Corporate Lobbying ?
Abstract
How do firms respond to greener household preferences? We construct a novel index of environmental willingness to act and relate it to firm-level information on the U.S. automotive sector from 2006 to 2019. We find that firms persistently redirect innovation from conventional combustion technologies toward technologies that mitigate their emissions and electric vehicle technologies. However, we also uncover that firms pursue strategies consistent with deterring competition: (anti-environmental) lobbying and strategic patenting. On aggregate, a 1% increase in the growth rate of the index has effects similar to a 50% increase in fuel price growth.
About this workshop
The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.
The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.
Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.