Vlog with Prof. Ralf Martin (ICL) about the Influence of Environmental Concerns & Market Competition on Innovation

In their study external page Environmental Preferences and Technological Choices: Is Market Competition Clean or Dirty, Prof. external page Ralf Martin and his co-authors Prof. external page Philippe Aghion (College de France & INSEAD), Prof. external page Roland Bénabou (Princeton), and Prof. external page Alexandra Roulet (INSEAD) investigate the joint effect of consumers' environmental concerns and product-market competition on firms' decisions whether to innovate “clean” or “dirty”. They develop a step-by-step innovation model to capture the basic intuition that socially responsible consumers induce firms to escape competition by pursuing greener innovations. To test and quantify the theory, the authors bring together patent data from the automobile industry, survey data on environmental values, and competition measures. 

In this episode of the Center for Law & Economics' vlog & podcast series, Prof. Ralf Martin discusses the background of the study and its findings with Ph.D. student Luca Baltensperger (CLE / ETH Zürich).