Innovation, Productivity and Environmental Performance of Technology Spillovers Effects: Evidence from European Patents within the Triad

The aim of this paper is that of investigating whether the integration process between environmental activities is important in the Spillovers flows analysis. For this reason, we explore the role of knowledge externalities for large international firms engaged both in environmental and in non-environmental activities. In particular, we develop a theoretical framework and an empirical analysis of the United States, Japan and Europe based upon a dataset composed of worldwide R&D-intensive firms. In order to deal with the firms’ unobserved heterogeneity and the weak exogeneity of the regressors, we implement the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) method. The results show a differentiated impact of environmental spillovers on firms’ productivity and green performance, by suggesting some interesting policy implications in terms of actions to favor full sustainability of firms’ production.