The aim of this paper is to analyze the factors affecting hydrogen and Carbon Capture and Storage Technologies (“CCS”) policies, taking into consideration Fossil Fuel Consumption, Oil Reserves, the Debt/GDP Ratio, the Trilemma Index and other variables with respect to OECD countries. STATA 17 was used for the analysis. The results confirm the hypothesis that countries with high fossil fuel consumption and oil reserves are investing in blue hydrogen and CCS towards a “zero-carbon-emission” perspective. Moreover, countries with a good Debt/GDP ratio act most favorably to green policies by raising their Public Debt, because Foreign Direct Investments are negatively correlated with those kinds of policies. Future research should exploit Green Finance policy decision criteria on green and blue hydrogen.

The aim of the paper is to analyze how regulatory design and its framework’s topics, other than macroeconomic factors, might impact green innovation by taking into consideration a brand-new renewable source of energy that is becoming more and more important in recent years: hydrogen and fuel cell patenting activities. Such activities have been used as a proxy for green technological change in a panel data of 52 countries over a 6-year period. A series of sectorial, energy regulation, and macroeconomic variables were tested to assess their impact on that technological frontier of green energy transition policy. As might have been expected, the empirical analysis carried out with the model that was prefigured confirms significant evidence of lock-in effects on fossil fuel policies. The model confirms, however, another evidence: countries already investing in renewables might be willing to invest in hydrogen projects. A sort of reinforcement to the further development of green sustainable strategies seems to derive from having already concretely undertaken this direction. Future research should exploit different approaches to the research question and address the econometric criticalities mentioned in the paper, along with exploiting results of the paper with further investigations.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the economic and financial assets that influence vaccine research investments by pharmaceutical companies. Starting from vaccine manufacturing process, the first part describes European Union (EU) and United States (US) regulatory systems and the relative Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). Then, the main obstacles to vaccine research and the main strategies suitable to enhance it are discussed. The second part introduces an empirical analysis of 10 pharmaceutical companies’ corporate Research and Development (R&D) from the 2008-2015 period by using STATA 12, through a Fixed Effect estimation of two models. The three hypotheses considered regard the main assets that influence vaccine research and why, the relevance of properties acquisition as a substitute for R&D as whether regulatory framework does obstruct investments choices or not. The results confirm that liquidity and size have a positive impact on vaccine research, whereas leverage influences it negatively. In addition, more acquisitions lead to fewer R&D investments since companies find less expensive to acquire knowledge rather than investing on it. Finally, a Chow Test that considers 2010 as a breaking point, led to no structural breaks for panel data, which implies that the new European Regulatory Directive on pharmacovigilance has no influence on the pharmaceutical companies’ behaviour. Keywords: vaccines, health economics, research & development