Business support policies designed to raise productivity and employment are common worldwide, but rigorous micro-econometric evaluation of their causal effects is rare. We exploit multiple changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a major program to support manufacturing jobs...

Can directed technical change be used to combat climate change? We construct new firm-level panel data on auto industry innovation distinguishing between "dirty" (internal combustion engine) and "clean" (e.g. electric and hybrid) patents across 80 countries over several decades. We show that...

Are climate policies good or bad for growth? Many policy makers who are trying to implement such policies are promising positive growth effects not only in the long run of 50 to 100 years, when effective climate policies will help to mitigate the potentially catastrophic economic consequences of...

<em>This report is co-authored by <a href="http://simpatic.eu/author/antoine-dechezlepretre/" target="_blank">Antoine Dechezleprêtre</a>, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics; and  Myra Mohnen, University College London.</em> How much should governments subsidize the development of new clean technologies? We...

An extensive literature on the convergence of productivity between countries examines whether productivity is pulled towards the global frontier country, perhaps due to learning and knowledge spillovers. More recently, studies within countries use the wide dispersion of productivity across firms...