This dissertation investigates the economic competition among green technologies in the context of the energy transition, with a particular focus on low-carbon hydrogen. Beyond the classic “grey-to-green” paradigm that models cleaner technologies replacing fossil-fuel-based alternatives, this work emphasizes the increasingly relevant competition within green technologies.
This thesis explores the major challenges of decarbonizing the transport sector, with a focus on the French automobile market. It highlights the limitations of poorly targeted subsidies and recommends more effective policies, such as support for used electric vehicles and standards for the size of new electric vehicles.
We exploit new data on NGO campaigns that target banks financing fossil fuels (“brown” banks) to build a measure of French banks’ environmental reputation, which we merge with granular data on bank deposits and loans of households in France over 2010-2020. We find that banks receive relatively fewer household deposits when they are perceived as browner.
