Patents aren’t key to clean tech
Ulrich Hege, Toulouse School of Economics and ECGI, Sebastien Pouget, Toulouse School of Economics AND Yifei Zhang, Peking University, ’24, February, “Climate Patents and Financial Markets,” Finance Working Paper N° 961/2024 ECGI, accessed July 11, 2024, https://www.ecgi.global/sites/default/files/working_papers/documents/climatepatentsandfinancialmarkets.pdf
Finally we look at the effects of non-instrumented raw climate patent counts as measure of increased climate innovation. This enables us to explore the real impact of the underlying climate- related technologies, independently of the granting of patent protection for these technologies. We find significant improvements in operating performance, in line with similar effects documented in the literature for non-climate patents (Kogan, Papanikolaou, Seru, and Stoffman, 2017), and also significant reductions in direct (Scope 1) emission intensity starting in year 3 after the climate patent application. Thus, in line with our interpretation of the signal value of climate patents, we find that improvements in climate innovators’ operating performance and carbon efficiency are linked to the underlying technology and not to the innovator being granted patent protection.