Webinar by Albert Roger, ZEW

Please join us for a webinar on Tuesday the 18th of Feb. 2020 at 11:00 London time i.e. 12:00 Brussels time, 13:00 Athens time. The speaker is Albert Roger, ZEW. The title of the talk is "Estimating Technological Gains and Losses from International Environmental Agreements: the Case of Stock Pollutants".

This webinar is free and open to all. The moderator will be Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos. The program we use to deliver webinars is called FreeConference. It is a browser based program and it requires Google Chrome. To join us follow this link: https://hello.freeconference.com/conf/call/3011249

To participate and for further information, please contact Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos at least a day prior to the seminar.

Abstract: Global environmental problems, like climate change or the depletion of the ozone layer are due to stock pollutants, e.g. CO2. As solving them requires multilateral action, international environmental agreements (IEAs) appear as the key regulatory instrument for enabling it. Nevertheless, the uncertainty related to the consequences of their signature makes them prone to long negotiations. Therefore, understanding and quantifying their economic impact is a challenging but essential task in order to reduce the uncertainty of future IEAs. In this paper I develop a methodology to give a  first approximation of the welfare impact of an IEA. For this I quantify the technological gains and losses of an IEA on patent value. My method overcomes typical shortcomings of former studies and takes into account anticipation and delay effects. With this purpose I build a model of patent renewal under uncertain exogenous regulation that helps me disentangle the impact of a particular IEA on technological change. I estimate it using a unique pollutant-specific data set combining European patent data and policy reports from an IEA.