Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Examining Drivers and Effects of Voluntary Environmental Program

(Natural Resource Security, Energy and Environmental Policy)

Firms, public enterprises and organizations, and subnational governments in the U.S. and globally have increasingly engaged in a diverse array of climate action proactively and/or as part of compliance with new government mandates. This panel brings together two papers that examine the different motivations of private and public actors in engaging in proactive environmental actions and two papers that investigate the extent to which energy policies by national governments spur technological innovation. The first paper introduces a framework to characterize green signaling behavior by firms, non-profits, and government organizations based on two dimensions: First, green signaling behavior either provide exclusively public benefits or a mix of public and private benefits. The second dimension addresses the extent to which actors invest in additional resources to increase their signaling strength. The authors employ data from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program to illustrate the utility of this framework and provide insight about the content and targets of multidimensional signals. The second paper investigates whether global businesses that join voluntary climate initiatives emit less carbon. To adjudicate between explanations about proactive climate action by corporations based on international processes of diffusion, domestic political economy, and firm-level management structures and incentives, the paper employs Cragg’s (1971) two-stage double-hurdle model, which allows the participation decision and CO2 emissions of a firm to be determined by different processes, while accounting for selection bias. The third paper explores the impact of national energy policy on the innovation of fuel-efficient technologies in the automobile industry. With a particular focus on the three major auto-manufacturing countries, United States, Japan, and Germany, this research examines how fuel prices, fuel economy and auto emission standards affect patenting of fuel-efficiency technologies both at home and abroad among the three countries, and furthermore, the dynamics of international knowledge spillovers based on patent citation statistics. The last paper examines the impact of energy-efficiency policy on innovation in household appliance firms. Using patent data, the author tests the hypothesis that ENERGY STAR participating firms are more likely to innovate than non-ENERGY STAR participating firms in refrigerator energy-efficiency related patents using a difference-in-differences method. The result confirms that there is a positive relationship between energy-efficiency policy and innovation that support the weak version of the Porter Hypothesis. The results also show that ENERGY STAR participating firms are more active in energy-related refrigerator patenting.