Policy uncertainty can undermine the power of government subsidies to stimulate environmentally friendly research and development. We show that Chinese firms’ green R&D falls as the uncertainty of environmental subsidies rises: Exogenous, weather-driven air pollution variability induces subsidies to fluctuate, and firms in areas with high weather-driven subsidy variability undertake less green R&D and hire fewer technical employees, controlling for the average level of subsidies. Heavy emitters and environmental technology firms are more affected. The results also illustrate how policy uncertainty can arise when policymakers are influenced by conditions that are salient but with causes that are difficult to disentangle.

We propose a novel identification strategy to estimate the long-term imprinting effects of being born in the Great Recession on innovative startups. After purging ubiquitous selection biases and sorting effects, we find that recession startups experience substantially better long-term outcomes in terms of survival and growth in employment and sales, despite being born when funding is scarce and demand is declining. In contrast to prior work, we find that the recession does not encourage entry into entrepreneurship as job prospects dim; instead, it discourages exit by critical R&D workers who help recession startups out-innovate and out-perform expansion startups