Date of Award

8-23-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Public Administration

Advisor(s)

David Popp

Keywords

Environmental policy;Green innovation;Innovation studies;Renewable energy;Smart grids;Standards

Subject Categories

Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration | Public Policy | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the link between technology standards and innovation in green energy technologies. The first paper investigates the effects of compatibility standards on follow-on innovation at the firm-level in smart grid technology. Using data on the adoption of standards in 19 OECD countries and weights that capture the unique composition of each firm’s country markets, we find that higher exposure to changes in standardization causes a decline in firms’ patenting activity. This negative effect is concentrated in large incumbents and is partially offset by an increase in the quality of inventions. This suggests a tradeoff in the effects of standards on the quantity versus the quality of innovation, which might occur because standards help focus inventive activity onto high-quality pathways. The second paper tests this technological focusing hypothesis more directly using an analysis of citations at the patent-level in three clean energy technologies: solar photovoltaic, wind turbines and smart grids. I leverage variation in standard counts across different cohorts of patents and technologies to estimate how standards affect patent citations. I find that standards cause an increase in patent citations, implying that they help inventors better utilize existing knowledge. Furthermore, when estimating the effects of standards across different quantiles of the patent quality distribution, I find that the increase in citations is concentrated in high-quality patents. The third paper explores how standards affect knowledge transfers between different domains of smart grids technology. I use patent citation data to identify inventions that are highly influential within the citation network. Using this subsample of influential patents, I garner qualitative insights about the field’s main knowledge trajectory. For example, influential patents appear to play an important role in transferring expertise across different sectors of smart grid technology. Findings from this exploratory analysis can help identify where important knowledge flows have occurred, with a view to informing future research on the causal effects of standards on knowledge transfers.

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