Documents Veugelers, Reinhilde 18 results

"As universities open themselves up to the marketplace for knowledge and ideas to a greater degree than in the past, debates over university missions has been common. How can universities match their third mission, contribution to society, with their main missions of education and curiosity-driven basic research to achieve their full growth potential? This will require a change in policy attention from targeting university patenting and faculty spin-offs, to taking a broader view on universities' contribution to economic development, including other pathways, most notably collaborative modes and mobility of trained human capital from academe to industry."

"Beset by an unprecedented combination of challenges including globalisation, demographic shifts, high unemployment and climate change, Europe is in dire need of a new kind of growth and development strategy. The authors of this Forum make compelling arguments for a socioecological transition, in which traditional measures of progress like GDP growth are downplayed in favour of factors such as social inclusion, environmental welfare, high levels of employment and the well-being of European citizens. This Forum explores some of the issues that must be resolved in order to fully achieve the socio-ecological transition, including the necessary decoupling of non-renewable energy use from GDP growth, the reduction of income and wealth inequalities, and the encouragement of innovation that is not based on fossil fuel technology. The Forum presents an optimistic path forward for the continent, with practical policy solutions that do not ignore the many obstacles facing a successful transition."

"This working paper reviews the evidence on the impact of public R&D spending. The authors first look at the evidence from micro-analysis of the impact of public intervention on private R&D and innovation, with a focus on the latest results from crosscountry micro-research performed within SIMPATIC.



To analyse the impact of public R&D on growth, the micro-results on private R&D investment effects are complemented with a macro-perspective. To this end, the authors look at how public R&D performs in affecting GDP growth and jobs in applied macro-models most commonly used in EU policy analysis. They focus particularly on the NEMESIS model in development within the SIMPATIC project.



The authors conclude with some policy recommendations from the reviewed micro and macro SIMPATIC evidence for designing public R&D projects and programmes."

"The EU's stagnation on many innovation indicators led to a number of efforts to spur a turnaround. One of most visible projects has been the Horizon 2020 strategy, which devotes unprecedented levels of funding to the promotion of R&D and innovation. But does this strategy address the right issues to promote innovation? Is Horizon 2020 right to ignore geographical considerations when allocating funding? What policy instruments does Horizon 2020 recommend, and has it led to novel strategies being employed, beyond the increase in R&D funding? What steps are individual countries taking? Most importantly, what impact is Horizon 2020 actually having on innovation in the EU?"

"In this contribution we describe how green policies should be designed to activate private innovation forces for ecological transitions. We look at the evidence on the current deployment of green policies and the current performance of the private green innovation machine. We try to assess how strong which types of government interventions have and can be to power the green innovation machine. An important insight from the economic analysis of the effectiveness of the public intervention for green innovations, is the complementarity between policy instruments, requiring an adequate policy mix of instruments, rather than a focus on individual instruments. The evidence provides little support for the efficacy of single instruments, like subsidies, when used in isolation. For the EU, this is perhaps the biggest challenge for its green technology policy: the lack of a sufficiently high carbon price. And as the evidence has shown that the world of green science and technologies is an emerging global, multipolar one, with many geographically dispersed sources in the various green scientific fields and technologies, coordination of green policies internationally should therefore be high on the policy agenda."

"That the successful use of process technology crucially depends on the right organizational infrastructure is known for a long time as well as the fact that the adoption of new process technology may need organizational change to be used in an efficient way. The strand of the literature dealing with productivity or competitiveness effects of environmental technology adoption, however, has largely neglected these aspects. Using data from the German part of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS 2008), this study aims at closing this gap in the literature. The central research question is whether firms that introduced greenhouse gas abatement technologies (CO2) into their production process can make more efficient use of such technology if it is introduced jointly with organizational change. The latter covers the introduction of new methods of process organization, the introduction of new forms of work management, and new methods of dealing with external relations.
As to bring this question to an empirical test, we model firms' production function by relying on a standard Cobb- Douglas functional form augmented by firms' endogenous decision variables concerning the introduction of CO2 abatement technologies (henceforth green innovations) and/or organizational change. In brief, we test whether firms that jointly adopted green and organizational innovations achieve higher productivity (i.e. produce more outputs with the same amounts of inputs) compared to other firms. As to take the endogeneity of the choice variables into account, we use the predicted probabilities from a discrete choice model as instruments for the endogenous innovation adoption variables in the production function approach. The discrete choice models include several determinants of the decision to introduce green or organizational innovations and furthermore accounts for the fact that both adoption decisions are not independently determined. Thus, both discrete choices are estimated jointly in a bivariate probit regression that provides predicted probabilities for any combination of green and organizational innovation adoption (i.e. neither of them, green only, organizational only, or both).
The empirical analysis provides strong and robust evidence for complementarity of green and organizational innovations with respect to firms' productivity. On the one hand, we find that firms which introduced green technology without organizational change to have lower productivity compared to the control group, i.e. firms that introduced neither green nor organizational innovations. On the other hand, firms that introduced both types of innovations jointly enjoy a higher productivity compared to the control group. These results have important implications for the economically advantageous and sustainable introduction of environmental technology in the business sector. Changes in firms' organizational structure appear crucial for using new CO2 abatement technologies in more efficient ways facilitating comparability of commercial and environmental goals."

"This Policy Brief, co-written by Senior Non-Resident Fellow Philippe Aghion, Senior Resident Fellow Reinhilde Veugelers and David Hemous of Harvard University, attempts to change the terms of the debate surrounding climate change policy. The authors argue that policymakers should do more to encourage innovation and investment in ‘green' research and development rather than focusing solely on the setting of a carbon price. Using a model developed by Aghion in a previous paper, they argue that a carbon price would have to be about 15 times higher in the first five years and 12 times higher in the next five years if innovation is not properly subsidized by governments. The authors also provide several policy recommendations for incentivising this type of ‘green growth' in the private sector."