The evolving boundary of green technologies

The paper investigates the effects of patent reclassification on the impact exerted by green inventive activities. Exploiting an original database that collects patent information from different releases of the PATSTAT database and a quasi-experiment design, the paper aims at explaining whether reclassified green patents (i.e., patents that are considered as environmentally friendly in new editions) receive more citations from subsequent patents than non-reclassified ones.