The greening of the automotive industry

Global Coordination Challenges in the Transition to Clean Technology: Lessons from Automotive Innovation with Eugenie Dugoua Working paper available here

This project investigates how the main firms in the automotive industry were induced to focus on innovating and producing electric vehicles.

This project takes the form of a quantitative narrative guided by theory.

The guiding idea is that this industrial change posed a global coordination problem, in which global players, co-dependent on a global supply-chain, had to converge on a common clean technology. For a long time, firms had to deal with fragmented innovation policies, different countries pushing for different technologies (the main contenders being hydrogen fuel cells and batteries). No institution or policy process coordinated this choice. We analyze how firms adapted their strategy and show how this coordination failure likely slowed the transition to clean vehicles.

In collaboration with: Eugenie Dugoua