The three chapters in this dissertation use firm-level data from Vietnam, Chile, and a set of Eastern-European countries to understand the importance of foreign direct investment in technology diffusion and subsequent environmental implications of changes in the production process. Chapter 1 investigates whether increased within-firm or within-industry foreign exposure, or foreign exposure from domestic downstream industry increases technology adoption. Chapters 2 and 3 look beyond technology spillovers of foreign investment, considering whether increased foreign investment affects domestic firm energy intensities. Chapter 2 studies whether domestic Vietnamese firms that become suppliers of domestic foreign-owned firms experience differential technology adoption and changes in energy intensity. Chapter 3 studies whether increased within-firm or within-industry foreign exposure, or foreign exposure from domestic downstream industry in Chile affects firm-level energy intensities.

Studying manufacturing and service firms in Eastern-European countries, Chapter 1 finds that technology gains from domestic foreign exposure differ between lower-income and higher-income countries. In higher-income countries, increased within-industry foreign exposure and increased foreign exposure from downstream industries on average increases technology adoption.

Studying Vietnamese manufacturing firms, Chapter 2 finds that firms that become suppliers of domestic foreign firms are on average more likely to have innovated than their non-supplier peers. These technology gains are found not to translate into short-run changes in energy intensity.

Studying Chilean manufacturing firms, Chapter 3 finds as firms experience increased within-firm foreign investment, they on average increase their electricity intensity. Moreover, increased within-industry foreign exposure on average increases electricity intensity for all firms, and fuel intensity for firms in ``dirty'' industries.

We consider when and to what extent a country will unilaterally protect intellectual property when it does no patentable innovation of its own. Framing the strength of an intellectual property regime in terms of the scope of patents, our model analyzes incentives of developing countries to manufacture generic versions of patented goods. The model provides insights into where problems arise in negotiating intellectual property treaties, when multinationals want to license intellectual property for local manufacture, and how changes in wealth and technology affect a country’s intellectual property regime.

Given the fact that fuel efficiency and safety technologies are now being developed and deployed rapidly, saving gasoline and lives while incidentally rendering older analyses obsolete, this dissertation provides further discussions and insights on the relationship between fuel economy and vehicle safety using new empirical evidence. The different roles of size and weight are at the center of our concern; they have not yet been definitively separated in most studies. Another major component of this dissertation research is to study the impacts of the 2011 U.S. CAFE reform. This dissertation research employs an empirically estimated medium-run model to study the equilibrium effects of the 2011 CAFE reform. Micro-level data and counterfactual policy simulations are used to investigate the welfare implications of the “attribute-basing” structure (i.e., in which regulatory compliance depends upon some secondary attribute that is not the intended target of the regulation) of the footprint-based CAFE standards, including both potential benefits and likely costs.

This dissertation encompasses three works on nuclear power plants (NPPs). A theme common to all chapters is the question of why nuclear power has failed to achieve the success envisioned by its proponents, particularly when that success has been achieved at certain times and in certain places yet failed to continue into the present day or disseminate globally. I address my research questions with a theoretical framework informed by the study of political economy, which I argue is necessary to understand this politically-charged subject. In Chapter 1, I study lead time---the duration of construction and commissioning---which is an important determinant of the capital cost of NPPs. For an industry dominated by a handful of multinational firms, the degree of cross-national variation is surprising. NPP lead times have historically trended upwards over time in Western nations, and yet they are comparatively quick and stable in East Asia. I theorize that the institutional capacity and autonomy of subnational governments can partially explain these patterns in the data. Having assembled a novel dataset on the design specifications of the global population of NPPs, I empirically document a positive association between political decentralization and NPP lead time that is not explained by observed cross-country differences in NPP design. The results are suggestive of the hypothesis that political decentralization creates conditions that slow NPP construction for non-technical reasons. However, the findings are not robust to certain robustness checks and fail to rule out the possibility that unobserved differences in design explain this association.

In Chapter 2, I study the operational reliability of NPPs, which has globally trended upwards since the 1970s. Previously, Davis and Wolfram (2012) showed that the transfer of NPP ownership from vertically-integrated utilities under cost-of-service regulation to independent power producers operating in competitive wholesale electricity markets substantively contributed to the upward trend in reliability in the United States. However, international data reveal persistent and large cross-country differences in NPP reliability. Notably, NPPs in the United States substantially outperform their peers in other highly developed economies, even those with earlier and more comprehensive liberalizations of their electricity sector. The present work extends the analysis of Davis and Wolfram (2012) to nearly the global population of NPPs and encompasses a more diverse set of ownership structures and regulatory frameworks under which countries restructured their electricity markets beginning in the 1990's. I find the effects of restructuring on NPP reliability vary widely by country, with the clearest successes in the United States and Canada, but muted or even negative impacts elsewhere. Chapter 3 focuses specifically on the United States and makes three contributions. First, I present novel empirical evidence to support prior qualitative and historical work which characterizes the regulatory environment for NPPs in the United States as having dramatically escalated, beginning circa 1970. Second, I find a positive partial association between certain regulatory phenomena and the time required for a reactor to receive a license and begin commercial operation, subject to several controls. Among other results, I show that state intervention in reactor licensing (which is formally solely under federal purview) is positively associated with longer licensing duration, specifically in the 1970s but not earlier. Third, I ask whether the licensing hold-up achieved its stated goal of increased reactor safety. While my methods lack causal identification, I show that reactors which took longer to receive an operating license exhibit a noticeably lower rate of common, low-level safety incidents in comparison to other reactors of the same age and technical characteristics. Finally, in Appendix A, I present a novel dataset of NPPs that encompasses technical, economic, political, regulatory, and geographical characteristics of the global population of commercial nuclear power plants. I combined a large number of publicly available datasets with extensive original data collection and cleaning. My database is the backbone of this dissertation and should be of use for many possible future research projects. Except for certain restricted-access data provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency, I have made the data available for public dissemination at https://github.com/a-g-benson/Global-NPP-Database.