Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/203641 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
Beiträge zur Jahrestagung des Vereins für Socialpolitik 2019: 30 Jahre Mauerfall - Demokratie und Marktwirtschaft - Session: Economic Theory - Evolution and Learning No. D24-V2
Publisher: 
ZBW - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft, Kiel, Hamburg
Abstract: 
We study optimal subsidies for renewable energy (RE) generation to internalize external benefits from intertemporal learning-by-doing spillovers, taking into account increasing marginal costs at the industry level due to limited availability of sites suitable for RE. We find that the optimal RE subsidy is differentiated according to productivity and derive a condition on production and spillovers under which less efficient, i.e. more costly, technologies should receive higher support, as common in actual policy-making. We show that such a support of technological diversification is optimal if (i) the elasticity of learning by doing is large, which means that technologies rapidly mature with little further scope for learning, and if (ii) productive sites are scarce, which limits future utilization of knowledge.
Subjects: 
learning spillovers
subsidies
industrial policy
renewable energy
feed-in-tariffs
differentiation
JEL: 
D21
D24
D62
D83
Document Type: 
Conference Paper

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