We investigate the effect of energy liberalizations on policies that support renewable energy in a long panel of OECD countries. We estimate this effect accounting for the endogeneity of liberalization related to joint decisions within a country’s energy strategy. Using regulation in other industries as instruments, we find that energy liberalization increases the public support to renewable energy. The effect of liberalization is the second largest after the effect of per-capita income and is fully driven by reductions in entry barriers, while the effect of privatization is negative. Finally, our results are robust to dynamic specifications and various policy indicators.

Assessing the economic consequences of sustainable production choices aimed at reducing negative environmental externalities is crucial for policy making, in light of the increasing interest and awareness experienced in recent EU policy packages. This assessment is one of the goals of the current work, which tries to provide new empirical evidence on the economic returns of circular economy practices, drawing on previous literature on the underlying determinants of greener production choices, which are stated to differ from standard technological innovations as they are subject to a knowledge and an environmental externality. Using an original dataset on approximately 3000 Italian manufacturing firms, we provide evidence on the relations among innovations related to the circular economy concept and economic outcome in the short run. The evidence shows that in the short run, it is difficult to obtain economic gains from circular economy related innovations when taken in isolation, especially for Small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), who may also experience negative returns.

This work investigates entrepreneurial intentions among academic scientists. Drawing from the literature on entrepreneurial behavior, it contributes to delineate the differences in motivations that are correlated with entrepreneurial intention to those that are considered to be linked to entrepreneurial behaviors. By disentangling the concept of motivations in its ultimately basic constructs of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, we investigate how these two different types of motivations are related to the formation of entrepreneurial intention at the level of academic scientists. Through a survey conducted at the University of Ferrara—one of the leading universities in Italy in terms of technology transfer and scientific production—findings reveal that while academic entrepreneurial intention seems to be mostly driven by intrinsic motivations, the effect of extrinsic motivations, which are regarded as a main antecedent of entrepreneurial behavior among scientists, are largely mediated by academic positions, work environment and different combinations of these two factors. This work therefore highlights the importance of social norms in the investigation of entrepreneurial intention in academia.

Taking an economic-geographical perspective, through a panel analysis of Italian municipal solid waste (MSW) data, we show that although decoupling for waste generation from income is absent, there are some signs of absolute decoupling for landfilled waste. Within this general picture, geographical and socio-economic differentiation across Italian provinces seems to matter. Spatial effects at the level of provinces – the institutions that primarily manage waste regulations – seem to be negligible, especially for landfilled waste. This is consistent with the fact that the definition and implementation of landfill policy effectively happened at sub-provincial (even municipal) levels; as a result, the recent waste policy decentralisation process has been characterised by fragmented actions. In light of this fragmentation, we note that although North-South waste performances show some signs of convergence, greater co-ordination aimed at complete convergence in waste performance, in a decentralised policy scenario, will be needed for the effective achievement of EU national based targets by a federal country.