Does government funding influence the choice of research topics? Novel grant-making modalities such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program aim to encourage scientists to take on difficult-to-solve, wicked societal problems such as clean energy. Yet little causal evidence exists linking funding and research direction, with most existing studies focusing on health sciences. We provide new evidence on the effect of funding on clean energy research, addressing two questions: (1) Do scientists change the focus of their research in response to targeted government funding opportunities? (2) If so, what types of calls for funding best attract new researchers? Using data on grants from the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, we combine text and regression analyses to compare the publication trajectories of funded scientists to a set of matched controls. After funding, the research of funded scientists becomes more similar to the grant topic than that of the matched controls. The effect is largest for ARPA-E, which explicitly aims to attract new scientists to clean energy research, suggesting that agency efforts to attract new researchers to a topic area can succeed. General calls for funding such as offered by traditional NSF directorates generate less movement.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are crucial for cutting transportation emissions, yet the policy drivers of EV innovation remain underexplored. This study analyzes firm-level panel data on EV and battery patents, covering more than 4,000 firms across 19 countries from 2010 to 2021, to assess how these policy tools and their interactions in different time horizons influence innovative activity. We test the effects of individual policy instruments that either raise demand for EVs or support the development of EV technologies. Stringent fuel-economy standards, financial incentives, adoption targets, and public R&D investments each significantly increase patenting in EV and battery technologies. Moreover, long-term EV targets amplify the innovative impact of public R&D and standards while diminishing the marginal effect of short-term price signals. The results suggest that governments can accelerate clean automotive innovation by combining long-term adoption commitments with sustained R&D investment or strong performance standards, and by managing these instruments as a coordinated policy portfolio rather than as separate tools. The study contributes cross-country, firm-level evidence that links policy design to the direction of clean technology innovation.

We examine the effect of in-state and out-of-state renewable energy policies on wind energy patenting. Using a semiparametric fixed-effects Tobit model, we regress patent counts on a series of policy variables within a state and a spatially weighted average for each of these policies implemented in other states. We develop a lower bound for the marginal effects and find important differences across policy types. For renewable portfolio standards, overall demand matters. Policies in other states increase innovation, but own-state policies do not. In contrast, for financial incentives such as tax incentives and subsidy policies, own-state policies induce innovation.

As countries reform their patent laws to be in compliance with the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement, an important question is how increased patent protection will affect drug prices in low-income countries. Using pharmaceutical trade data from 1996 to 2005, we examine the role of China and India as suppliers of medicines to other middle- and low-income countries and evaluate the competitive effect of medicine imports from these countries on the price of medicines from high- income countries. We find that imports of antibiotics and unspecified medicaments from India and China significantly depress the average price of these commodities imported from high-income trading partners, suggesting that India and China are not only important sources of inexpensive medicines but also have an indirect effect by lowering prices through competition. As India is the leading supplier of medicines in Sub-Saharan Africa, this region will likely be affected most adversely.

In this paper, we improve upon Coe and Helpman’s model of international R&D spillovers, using seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) to include interdependence among national economies and allow for variations in coefficients across countries. We find that the impact of knowledge spillovers on national productivity is context dependent: positive in some cases while negative in others. From our interpretation, the results suggest that both beneficial and competitive effects from foreign knowledge spillovers are important. We view the most important contribution of our work as simply providing evidence of this variation, and suggesting directions for future research to explain this phenomenon.