Location Determinants Of Ecoinnovative Firms In France

This paper analyses the location determinants of eco-innovative firms in France. The analysis is based on a dataset obtained after merging firm-level microdata on the location of new firms from DIANE Mercantil Register (Bureau van Dijk) and patents information from the OECD REGPAT (2018) database for the period 2003 and 2013. This paper departs from previous contributions on the location determinants of eco-innovation in three main ways. First, it analyses the effects of the regional technological knowledge base and its composition focusing on environmental-based innovations. Second, it introduces spatial econometrics techniques to capture any potential spatial spillovers arising from the location of eco-innovative firms. And third, it focuses on the French case which is of special interest in view of the relevance of regional eco-innovation policies. Main results show that unrelated knowledge variety for environmental technologies and the political support in terms of investments for the protection of the environment are the main factors explaining the location of eco-innovative firms. Indeed, by applying spatial econometrics we found that there is a clear spatial dependence on the creation. However, our results also show that the impact of the knowledge composition is quite local. These results may have many implications for French departments’ environmental performance and sustainable growth.