Essay in applied environmental and innovation economics

Changes in consumption patterns, technological change and environmental innovations are essential to achieve the reduction of environmental externalities, to slow down the exploitation of natural resources and to reduce the likelihood of environmental disasters (e.g. climate change). The current dissertation touches some of these aspects by performing empirical applications in the fields of innovation and environmental economics. The dissertation is composed by two main blocks. The first block (chapters 2 and 3) employs a sector-level approach to investigate the patterns of emission efficiency in EU countries (chapter 2) and the extent to which aggregation bias affects the estimate of the amount of emissions induced by final con sumption activities by means of environmentally extended input-output models (chapter 3). The second block (chapter 4) relies on firm-level data with the aim of investigating the drivers of environmental innovation activities of firms and their effect on firm-level productivity. Finally, appendix A describes in detail the methodology I used to match firms in AIDA to patent applicants in the PATSTAT database. These data have been used in chapter 4.