Essay on the environmental consequences of research and development on agricultural varieties.

Summary The strong increase in agricultural yields observed throughout the last 150 years is largely due to the improvement of varieties, which is itself essentially the result of research and development processes. The social optimality of the research effort undertaken by firms in this sector, as well as of the institutions framing the research activity, is an important issue for public policy. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to shedding light on this issue, by attempting to take into account the environmental impact of innovation in agricultural varieties. We examine this topic through three different prisms: that of the innovation as such, that of the research process, and that of the institutional framework offered to research firms. We show that taking into account the environmental effects of research changes the optima of research, and should therefore lead to an adaptation of the incentive and regulatory framework.