Corinne Langinier University of Alberta

Please join us for a webinar on Tuesday the 6th of November 2018 at 16:00 London time i.e. 17:00 Brussels time, 18:00 Athens time. The speaker is Corinne Langinier, University of Alberta, Canada. Note that due to the time difference, the seminar will not take place during the usual time slot of 11:00 London time.

The title of the talk is “Green Technology and Patents in the Presence of Green Consumers". The moderator will be Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos.

The program we use to deliver webinars is called VSee and you can easily download it for free. A very short demo of VSee can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDb7-Mrz0L4.

This webinar is free and open to all. To participate and for further information, please contact Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos at least a day prior to the seminar.

Abstract: We develop a theoretical framework to investigate the impact of patent policies and emission taxes on green innovation that reduces the emission output ratio, and on the emission level. In the absence of green consumers, the introduction of patents results in a paradox whereby increasing emission tax beyond a certain threshold leads to a discrete increase in the emission level, which may be avoided by reducing the patenting cost. In the presence of green consumers, this paradox is restricted to an intermediate range of tax rates, and at sufficiently high tax rates, reducing the patenting cost may increase the emission level. Also, higher emission taxes increase green investment only if the fraction of green consumers is sufficiently small, and the magnitude of this effect decreases as this fraction increases. Moreover, a stricter patentability requirement is only effective at reducing emissions if the fraction of green consumers is sufficiently small.