研究目的
Investigating the connection between rent-seeking behaviour, corruption activity and quality of institutions to empirically evaluate the unexpected implications of an energy policy for criminal activity.
研究成果
The empirical findings reveal that an increase in corruption activity effectively occurred in the sunniest provinces after the introduction of the public subsidies. Also, such an evidence only appears in southern Italy, where institutional quality is the poorest in the country. The analysis leads to conclude that, in a weak institutional setting, the introduction of a program of public subsidies that represents an opportunity for rent-seeking may indeed favour the spread of bribery.
研究不足
The main shortcoming of employing a DiD to evaluate the policy under analysis is that it needs two clear groups to be compared: where the policy is implemented and where it is not. The identification strategy that exploits the level of solar radiation to approximate where the policy has had major effects seems to provide positive results. Nonetheless, such an approach can be challenged, as the Treatment is collapsed in a binary variable, which does not capture the continuous nature of the discriminant 'solar radiation'.
