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Environmental  Regulations, Market Structure and Technological Progress in Renewable  Energy Technology — A Panel Data Study on Wind Turbines / Dirk Rübbelke,  Pia Weiss. FEEM, 2011, 24 p. (Note di lavoro ; 2011.032)http://www.feem.it/userfiles/attach/201147934414NDL2011-032.pdfWe study the impact of environmental regulations on the patent  activities for wind turbines between 1980 and 2008. We explicitly  control for energy market liberalisation and take a potential  interaction between liberalisation and policy instruments into account.  We find a strong and highly significant effect of environmental tax  revenues, which we regard as a proxy for the extent to which energy  prices changed in favour of renewable energies, as well as foreign  demand for wind turbines on innovation activities. In addition, we find  that price-based policy instruments are more effective in fostering  innovations in the wind turbine technology when energy markets are fully  open to competition. In contrast, non-price-based policy instruments  such as grants or low interest rate loans are largely independent from  whether or not energy markets are liberalised (© authors)