Governments have allocated billions in funding to support firms in developing environmental technologies, yet the role of disclosure policies in these investments is largely overlooked. The effectiveness of public R&D interventions hinges on the extent to which they generate societal benefits through knowledge spillovers facilitated by disclosure. Using instrumental variables to address endogeneity, we find that social returns from environmental technology disclosure significantly exceed the private returns captured by firms, indicating systemic under-disclosure of environmental innovations. These findings underscore the need for policy reforms that restructure public R&D funding mechanisms to incentivize and enforce disclosure for recipients of government support.
