Medium–term Business Cycles, Green Innovations, and Sustainable Growth
Host Institution
NUS
22 May 2023
Explore how business cycles shape firms' choices between green and brown R&D, and what this means for sustainable growth. This study uses firm-level data from Singapore, the US, and Europe.
This article has been migrated from an earlier version of the site and may display formatting inconsistencies.
Grant details
Name of Recipient | Assistant Professor Zhang Donghai |
Project Title | Medium-term Business Cycles, Green Innovations, and Sustainable Growth |
Project Status | Ongoing |
Year Awarded | 2023 |
Type of Grant | Social Science Research Thematic Grant |
Funding Type | A |
Theme | The Future Economy | Climate Change & The Environment |
Green Research and Development (R&D), which focuses on developing clean technologies, is key to the Green transition. Similar to other investments, Green R&D projects undertaken by innovating firms are profit-driven and therefore interact with business cycles and macroeconomic policies. Additionally, the cyclicality of R&D projects may vary between Green R&D and Brown R&D, the latter pertaining to traditional polluting technologies. Therefore, business cycles might alter innovating firms’ choices between Green and Brown projects.
The proposed research project investigates the interaction between business cycles, Green Innovations, and sustainable economic growth. Using firm-level R&D data from Singapore, the United States (U.S.), and Europe, this project seeks to gain insights into the nature of R&D decisions for both Green and Brown technologies.
Theoretically, the project aims to develop a novel medium-term business cycle model that explores the implications of the newly uncovered nature of R&D decisions, which has important implications for the Green transition, and provide an additional model that distinguishes between Green and Brown R&D. The model will be extended to an open economy model and calibrated to the Singaporean economy.