About this event
Climate change leads to more destructive natural disasters, particularly hurricanes, which can significantly disrupt knowledge production. This paper studies the effects of Hurricane Katrina — the costliest and one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history — on inventors' innovation outcomes, including green innovation which helps combat climate change. Using hazard and patent data for U.S. inventors in a difference-in-differences design, I find that Katrina reduced inventors' production of green patents, while non-green patents were unaffected. Specifically, affected inventors could have produced an additional 0.220 green patents following the storm, i.e., a potential 415 percent increase, had Katrina not occurred. The negative effects are driven by the greater distance in technological expertise (knowledge diversity) among collaborators in green innovation teams, making it harder to substitute for affected inventors and continue their technological tasks. These findings suggest that climate change can disrupt human efforts aimed at addressing it, particularly through natural disasters and that knowledge diversity can compromise the resilience of technological development when faced with disruptions.
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This event will take place in SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.
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