The Impact of Energy Prices on Green Innovation

Based on patent data and industry specific energy prices for 18 OECD countries over 30 years we investigate on an industry level the impact of energy prices on green innovation activities. Our econometric models show that energy prices and green innovation activities are positively related and that energy prices have a significantly positive impact on the share of green innovations in non-green innovations. More concretely, our main model shows that a 10% increase of the average energy prices of the previous five years results in a 2.7% and 4.5% increase of the number of green innovations and the share of green innovations in non-green innovations, respectively. We also find that the impact of energy prices increases with an increasing lag between energy prices and innovation activities. Robustness tests confirm the main results

Determinants of Green Innovation: The Impact of Internal and External Knowledge

Based on a comprehensive data set comprising 13 countries, 22 industries and a period of 30 years we investigate the impact of internal and external knowledge pools of both green and other than green technologies on green patent activities. It turned out that the internal green knowledge stock is positively related to green patent activities with a considerably large marginal value. The country's green knowledge stock and the green knowledge stock of the same industry in other countries are also positively related with industries' green patent activities, although with a significantly lower marginal value. External other than green knowledge stocks are negatively related with green inventions. The considerable greater marginal value for internal green knowledge stock indicates that a free-riding position on green technology investments of other industries in the same country or the same industry in other countries does not seem to be very promising in terms of green inventions. The negative marginal effect of external other than green knowledge stocks and the positive marginal value of external green knowledge stocks indicate that country level policy measures to promote green knowledge formation would provide additional positive effects for green inventions on an industry level

The Performance Effect of Environmental Innovations

While recent literature has focused on explaining the determinants of green innovations, it is not well understood how such innovations affect performance. To analyse the relationship between green innovation and performance, new industry-level panel data were exploited: these include 12 OECD countries, the whole manufacturing sector and a period of 30 years. The results show that green inventions are U-shape related to performance. However, the turning point is quite high and hence only relevant for a few industries. This indicates that - given the current level of green promotion - market incentives alone are not sufficient to allow the green invention activities of industries to rise considerably

Long-term activity of biohybrid coatings of atrazine-degrading bacteria \u3ci\u3ePseudomonas\u3c/i\u3e sp. ADP

The atrazine-degrading bacterial strain Pseudomonas sp. ADP was immobilized by the sol–gel process within thin silica layers coated onto water-retaining carrier materials (expanded clay pellets and scoria). The performance of the obtained biohybrid material has been investigated concerning long-term activity under non-growth conditions. Experiments were run in phosphate buffer containing atrazine (20 mg l-1) as the sole source of carbon and nitrogen. Even after one year of consecutive batch tests, P. ADP immobilized onto expanded clay pellets showed a high atrazine degradation activity. In the course of long-term batch experiments, the average amount of removed atrazine was about 94% during each assay cycle. Staining with CTC revealed that in spite of cultivation under non-growth conditions over a period of one year, immobilized cells were still vital and showed respiratory activity