The paper investigates the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality in the context of the Kuznets curve, which foresees that growth, while initially causing negative externalities for the environment, eventually can be seen also as the solution to environmental degradation. The novelty of the paper is to analyze the role of environmental policies, and in particular the use of market-based and non-market instruments to challenge the pollution plague and mitigate climate change. The results of fixed effects estimates on a sample of 32 countries observed for the period 1992–2012 show the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and per-capita CO₂ emissions for the quadratic specification, as well as of an N-shaped pattern for the cubic specification. Most importantly, the stringency indexes, i.e., the proxies used to account for environmental regulation, exhibit negative and strongly significant coefficients, suggesting that the policies are effective in reducing environmental damages associated with economic growth.

This article analyses the effects of board composition on the behavior of a sample of 114 Italian local public utilities, for which information about 1630 directors during 1994–2004 has been collected. This period is particularly interesting because of the legal changes that forced many firms to alter their juridical form and accommodated the entrance of private investors. We investigate whether board size and/or board composition do affect decisions about employment and how they ultimately impact performance. Our main findings indicate that politically connected directors, who dominate boards of directors in Italian public utilities, exert a positive and significant effect on employment, and have a negative impact on performance.

Within the recent debate on liberalization of local public services, the paper investigates the cost properties of a sample of Italian public utilities providing in combination gas, water and electricity. The estimates from a Composite Cost Function econometric model (Pulley and Braunstein, 1992 Pulley, LB and Braunstein, YM . 1992. A composite cost function for multiproduct firms with an application to economies of scope in banking. Review of Economics and Statistics, 74: 221–30. ) are compared with the ones coming from other traditional functional forms such as the Standard Translog, the Generalized Translog, and the Separable Quadratic. The results highlight the presence of global scope and scale economies only for multi-utilities with output levels lower than the ones characterizing the ‘median’ firm. This indicates that relatively small specialized firms would benefit from cost reductions by evolving into multi-utilities providing similar network services such as gas, water and electricity. However, for larger-scale utilities the hypothesis of null cost advantages is not rejected. Thus, it is possible that the recent diversification waves of leading companies are explained by factors other than cost synergies, so that the welfare gains that can be reasonably expected from such examples of horizontal integration, if any, are likely to be very low.

The impact of centralization on pharmaceutical procurement prices: the role of institutional quality and corruption. Regional Studies. This paper deals with the open issue regarding centralized versus decentralized public procurement strategy. Using a unique dataset on tender prices of selected drugs for hospital usage provided by a sample of 52 Italian local health service providers (aziende sanitarie locali – ASLs) between 2009 and 2012, the paper tests which procurement system (centralized, decentralized or hybrid) performs better. Controlling for several covariates, including measures of institutional quality and corruption, it finds that centralized and hybrid procurers pay lower prices than decentralized units. Moreover, the results show that in areas in which institutional quality is lower or corruption is higher, the effect of centralization in terms of negotiating lower prices is much stronger, with savings of up to 60% of the price paid by ASLs that procure independently.