Carbon Tax, Carbon Leakage and the Theory of Induced Innovation in the Decarbonisation of Industrial Processes: The Case of the Port of Rotterdam

A higher price of CO2 emissions is required to enhance the industrial transition and investment in low-carbon technology. However, the specific mechanisms to tackle the risk of carbon leakage and create an attractive environment for green investment are highly contested in the academic literature. Opposing perspectives regarding the appropriateness and desirability of government intervention in the economy result in different approaches to the decarbonisation of industrial processes. This research builds on existing academic knowledge in the fields of carbon leakage, induced innovation and government intervention to assess the effects of a carbon tax in the industrial cluster of the Port of Rotterdam within the context of a carbon tax on industrial GHG emissions proposed in the Dutch National Climate Agreement. The main finding of this study shows that investment leakage constitutes the main threat instead of carbon leakage in the face of a higher carbon price. Regarding the theory of induced innovation, limited abatement options are available for the industrial cluster and there is the need to scale up existing technologies. Lastly, to both tackle the risk of investment leakage and enhance the scaling up of low-carbon technologies, government intervention in the form of regulations, subsidies and enabling conditions is vital.

The Development, Preservation and Loss of Differential Case Marking in Inner Asia Minor Greek

In Cappadocian and Pharasiot, the two main members of the inner Asia Minor Greek dialect group, the head nouns of NPs found in certain syntactic positions are marked with the accusative if the relevant NPs are definite and with the nominative if the NPs are indefinite. This differential case marking (dcm) pattern contrasts with all other Modern Greek dialects, in which the accusative is uniformly used in the relevant syntactic positions. After revisiting recent proposals regarding the synchronic status of dcm in Cappadocian and Pharasiot, I show how the two dialects developed this ‘un-Greek’ feature in the model of Turkish, which marks the head nouns of direct object NPs with an accusative suffix only if they take a specific reading leaving non-specific direct object NPs unmarked. I subsequently trace the diachronic trajectory of this contact-induced innovation within the two dialectal systems, seeking to explain why dcm was gradually lost in Cappadocian but preserved in Pharasiot.

Non-Neutral Marginal Innovation Costs, Omitted Variables, and Induced Innovation

Prior tests of Hicks’ Induced Innovation Hypothesis (IIH) have been greatly hampered because the lack of supply-side data implicitly requires the untenable assumption that the marginal research cost is the same for different inputs. We document that, with appropriate model specification and panel data, a two-way fixed-effects estimator can account for much of the non-neutrality of the innovation function. Using a test procedure that is robust to a time-variant and non-neutral innovation function, we test the IIH in U.S. agriculture for the period 1960–2004. We use only readily available data for innovation demand and total public research expenditures.