Inventors’ Personal Experience of Natural Disasters and Green Innovation (joint with Lisa Keding)
We show that personal experiences affect high-stakes economic behavior among inventors. Using matched patent and survey data from French and German inventors linked to natural disaster records, we exploit exogenous variation in disaster exposure. Inventors personally affected by natural disasters subsequently produce 8.2% more green patents, primarily driven by emission-reducing mitigation technologies, while non-green innovation remains unaffected. The absence of sizable spatial spillovers highlights the importance of personal experience. Disaster exposure shapes innovation choices by altering monetary expectations—specifically, through shifting higher-order beliefs about consumer demand and anticipated regulation. Embedding this channel in a theoretical model, we predict—and the data confirm—that effects are strongest in competitive markets, where pecuniary incentives matter most.
2024 Best Paper Award - Ivey-ARCS PhD Sustainability Academy
This paper supersedes an earlier version that was circulated under the title ”The Effects of Natural Disasters on Green Innovation”