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

•We collect and analyse the literature on the determinants of environmental innovations•We perform a meta-analysis on a dataset of papers and working papers•We find the likelihood of R&D as a driver for environmental innovation depends on methodological choices in previous papers•We find the likelihood of a policy-inducement effect depends on the nature of the policy instrument

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.