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 examines the potential impact of ownership on the cost of bus service provision for a sample of 65 private and 12 public companies providing local public transit (LPT) in Piedmont (Italy) from 1998 to 2002. A translog cost frontier is estimated using the model in Battese and Coelli ( 1995 Battese, GE and Coelli, TJ . 1995. A model for technical inefficiency effects in a stochastic frontier production function for panel data. Empirical Economics, 20: 325–32. [Crossref] [Google Scholar] ) where inefficiency scores are allowed to vary across firms and over time. A public ownership dummy is included in the inefficiency model and it is always positive and significant. Density and scale economies and cost inefficiencies are then computed. Private companies seem to experience higher density and scale economies than public ones. Cost inefficiencies appear higher in the public sample.

In each country, the occurrence of energy poverty among resident households is usually related to low income and its unequal distribution. Like other manifestations of material deprivation, however, such a phenomenon is likely to be also correlated with some internal socio-political factors that allow its persistence by preventing effective solutions. In this paper, we build and analyse a dataset for European countries by assessing the role of the perceived quality of internal public governance on different measures of energy deprivation. Specifically, we rely on the Worldwide Governance Indicators provided by the World Bank and estimate an array of panel models. After controlling for income, income inequality, energy prices, and weather conditions, we find that high government effectiveness, good regulatory quality, widespread property rights, contract enforcement, and corruption control are significantly associated with lower energy poverty. In addition, we consider the policy implications of this broader perspective on energy deprivation.

We study how changes in Diagnosis‐Related Group price regulation affect hospital behaviour in quasi‐markets with exclusive provision by public hospitals. Exploiting a quasi‐natural experiment, we use a difference‐in‐differences approach to test whether public hospitals respond to an exogenous change in Diagnosis‐Related Group tariffs by increasing C‐section rates and/or by upcoding. Controlling for a detailed set of mother characteristics, we find that price changes did not affect the probability of a C‐section. We do however find evidence of upcoding: Conditional on the birth delivery method (either a C‐section or a vaginal delivery), public hospitals experiencing the largest price change exhibit a higher probability of treating patients coded as complicated. This finding suggests that even public hospitals may be sensitive to market incentives.