Essays on Macroeconomic Effects and Determinants of Green Technical Change

Abstract

This dissertation contains four empirical chapters that relate to different notions of green technical change, and a prepended introductory chapter that puts the empirical part into perspective. The introductory chapter provides a comprehensive view on sustainable development with respect to the natural environment and the role of technology therein. For this purpose, it resorts to different streams of the literature including literature on economy-environment interactions, Earth system sciences, green growth, as well as economic growth theory. The first two empirical chapters deal with questions regarding the relationship between economic activity and the use of natural resources. The third paper considers regional economic returns to green technology development, while the fourth paper scrutinizes the impact of different oil market shocks on green innovation activity.