Investigating policy and R&D effects on environmental innovation: a meta-analysis

Abstract In the last decades, a wide research effort has been devoted at the analysis of the determinants of environmental innovation (EI). Whereas agreement seemed to emerge around a cluster of determinants, mainly “Technology push”, “Market pull”, “Policy push–pull” and “firm specific factors”, empirical analyses have failed to provide strong confirmation on the relevance of some core variables. After a qualitative discussion of this literature, we empirically assess it by exploiting meta-regression-analysis techniques to test the effectiveness of two determinants: policy and R&D. Our findings are clear: as for the first, we show that only certain types of policy have proven to affect EI, in particular regulatory stringency. As for R&D, we show that the use of estimation methods is not neutral to the outcome of the primary studies.