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The impact of the European Union common agricultural policy direct payments on land prices has received substantial attention in recent years, leading to heterogeneous evidence of capitalisation for both coupled and decoupled payments. In this paper, we provide an extensive review of the empirical works addressing this issue econometrically and compare their results through a Bayesian meta-regression model, focussing on the impact of decoupling and its implementation schemes. We find that the introduction of decoupled payments increased the capitalisation rate, although the extent of this increment hinges on the implementation scheme adopted by the member state.

We propose an empirical approach to estimate the impact of climate transition risk on corporate revenues that specifically accounts for reputational risk. We employ the information on disclosed Scope 3 emissions to proxy companies' carbon footprint along the value chain. A threshold regression is employed to identify the emission level above which reputational risk impacts revenues, and we link this impact to a climate policy stringency indicator. We estimate the threshold regression on a sample of companies within the European Union (EU), and find the threshold at around the 70th percentile of the Scope 3 emissions distribution. We find that companies with Scope 3 emissions beyond the threshold experienced substantially lower revenue growth as climate policies have become more stringent, compared to other companies.

This paper empirically explores the extent to which European cities are on track to sustainable development by examining the environmental performance of a large sample of cities observed during the last two decades. The paper builds on the Environmental Kuznets Curve framework and leverages satellite data to build a set of environmental indicators as varied and as granular as possible. Evidence suggests that European cities are, on average, on track to sustainable development, meaning that the contribution of their economic growth to environmental degradation is already negative or close to becoming so. The paper also examines Transnational City Networks as accelerators of environmental transition. The results suggest that cities participating in such networks anticipate the transition with respect to their peers.

We present a tractable methodology to estimate climate change costs at a 1 × 1 km grid resolution. Climate change costs are obtained as projected gross domestic product (GDP) changes, under different global shared socio-economic pathway–representative concentration pathway (SSP-RCP) scenarios, from a regional (multiple European NUTS levels) version of the Intertemporal Computable Equilibrium System (ICES) model. Local costs are obtained by downscaling projected GDP according to urbanized area estimated by a grid-level model that accounts for fixed effects, such as population and location, and spatially clustered random effects at multiple hierarchical administrative levels. We produce a grid-level dataset of climate change economic impacts under different scenarios that can be used to compare the cost – in terms of GDP loss – of no adaptation and the benefits of investing in local adaptation.

Reputation risk is among the possible climate transition risks companies face, especially in emission-intensive industries. Failing to meet stakeholders' expectations about the contribution to climate goals might influence investors' strategies and produce financial damages. We look at the climate-related social media talk in a sample of highly polluting companies. For these companies, reputation risk materialises if their climate talk is perceived as not coherent with their action-taking. We then assess the impact of climate talk on short-term stock market performance, as measured by abnormal returns, and find a positive association between climate-related social media talks and abnormal returns. The strength of this association lowers during peak days of social media attention on climate-related topics.

We present a tractable methodology to estimate climate change costs at a 1 x 1 km grid resolution. Climate change costs are obtained as projected gross domestic product (GDP) changes, under different global shared socio-economic pathway-representative concentration pathway (SSP-RCP) scenarios, from a regional (multiple European NUTS levels) version of the Intertemporal Computable Equilibrium System (ICES) model. Local costs are obtained by downscaling projected GDP according to urbanized area estimated by a grid-level model that accounts for fixed effects, such as population and location, and spatially clustered random effects at multiple hierarchical administrative levels. We produce a grid-level dataset of climate change economic impacts under different scenarios that can be used to compare the cost - in terms of GDP loss - of no adaptation and the benefits of investing in local adaptation.

This work projects future residential electricity demand in Italy at the local (1 km grid) level based on population, land use, socio-economic and climate scenarios for the year 2050. A two-step approach is employed. In the first step, a grid-level model is estimated to explain land use as a function of socio-economic and demographic variables. In the second step, a provincial-level model explaining residential electricity intensity (gigawatt hours [GWh] per kilometre of residential land) as a function of socio-economic and climatic information is estimated. The estimates of the two models are then combined to project downscaled residential electricity consumption. The evidence suggests not only that the residential electricity demand will increase in the future but, most importantly, that its spatial distribution and dispersion will change in the next decades mostly due to changes in population density. Policy implications are discussed in relation to efficiency measures and the design of green energy supply from local production plants to facilitate matching demand with supply.

This study analyzes the relationship between firms’ financial performance and their environmental performance, with a particular focus on greenhouse gas-intensive industries. Using financial and environmental data of international listed companies from 2011 to 2017, the financial impact of environmental performances was estimated, measured with multiple indicators that take into account disclosure aspects. The analysis was conducted across different industry aggregation levels, namely the entire group of industries, the Global Industry Classification System (GICS) Industry Group, and the GICS Industry. We found that environmental disclosure indexes are mostly not significant after controlling for environmental performance, suggesting that the effect of environmental disclosure on corporate financial performance is limited, if not altogether absent. In contrast, environmental performance seems to play an important role, and that holds even for high-emitting companies. Overall, our results were consistent with the interpretation that financial markets effectively consider the actual environmental performance of listed companies and, only to a minor extent, the quality of their disclosure.

In this paper we estimate the relationship between urban sprawl and a measure of air quality, namely the number of days in which the PM10 concentration exceeds safeguard limits in European Union cities. Building on a multidimensional representation of sprawl, the paper employs several indicators to account for built-up area development, population density, and residential discontinuity. The paper employs generalised additive models to disentangle the non-linear effects in the variables and the interaction effects of the three sprawl dimensions. A significant and robust effect of urban morphology emerges after controlling for socio-economic, demographic, and climatic factors and the geographical location of the city. We find that urban sprawl impacts positively on pollutant concentration, but the effect is highly context-specific because of threshold effects and interactions.

We study the capitalisation of subsidies in the European Union (EU) regions in the years 2006-2008, the first years after the introduction of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 2003 reform that decoupled subsidies from production and attached them to land. For this purpose, we use regional aggregated data and estimate the capitalisation rate upon the entire sample and, in a second stage, splitting the sample according to the implementation regime applied by the different EU Member States (MSs), following the three options introduced by the CAP regulations (historical, regional and hybrid model). We find that between 28 and 52 cents per Euro of additional subsidy capitalise into land prices in MSs that adopted the hybrid and the regional model, respectively. We find as well that subsidies do not capitalise in farmland prices in MSs that adopted the historical model.

We estimate a meta-regression of the willingness to pay (WTP) for green spaces in European urban and peri-urban areas obtained from contingent valuation (CV) studies to construct a benefit transfer (BT) function. Compared to previous studies that estimated meta-regression for urban green spaces, we introduce two main novelties. Firstly, we focus exclusively on Europe to reduce the heterogeneity due to unobservable factors that affect the estimates and their transferability. Secondly, we use urban socio-economic indicators and land-use data derived from terrestrial observations as proxies for the supply and demand of ecosystem services at the local level, allowing interactions between these variables and the specific characteristics of the site valued. We demonstrate that both approaches improve the accuracy of the estimates and, hence, the validity of the transferred values.

This work projects future residential electricity demand derived from cities and municipalities’ population and residential land-use projections. Starting from national-level energy intensity data, we derived statistically downscaled residential electricity consumption with the aim to disaggregate residential electricity at the local administrative unit level for all EU member states in the year 2050. The intensity in 2050 is obtained from population density that, in turn, depends on the evolution of population and residential land-use. Residential land-use is projected to 2050 according to a model linked to population trajectories at the LAU level via the share-of-growth method. Finally, country-level intensity multiplied by the projected value of LAU residential area returns the electricity demand for every LAU. The results suggest that the amount of electricity required by cities depends on their land-use patterns, but with an evident between-and-within-country heterogeneity. The national average temperature does not provide significant effects over the evolution of electricity demand, highlighting the need for more detailed climate-related variables. This evidence poses significant challenges for the planning of future cities because it points out how the current patterns of land-use will need to be properly categorized with respect to the development of future electricity requirements.

In urban contexts land-use planning can play a central role to promote adaptation and mitigation strategies to climate change. Limiting soil consumption, improving urban greening and restoring abandoned areas are three of the most important strategies towards a sustainable land use. The extent to which these three actions can be effectively implemented depends on the specific biophysical and cultural characteristics of the local context as well as on the preferences of residents. We conducted a Choice Experiment (CE) on a sample of 500 people living in four municipalities of the lake Garda western coastal strip, in Italy, to assess the willingness to pay (WTP) towards these three planning strategies based on alternative land-use. The proposed land use strategies are presented as a feasible way to improve the mitigation and adaptation capacity of the local context. Our results suggest that the local community perceives the growth rate of sealed areas as the most pressing issue, and people are in favour of measures aimed at containing the phenomenon. Efforts in this direction are needed and should inform the current policy debate on local land-use planning.

Undeveloped land adjacent to urban areas has a strong potential to generate high amenity values to urban dwellers via the adoption of environment-friendly agricultural practices. Yet, there is a lack of specific policy measures tailored to unlock such potential and a scant knowledge of the preferences of the main beneficiaries. Analysis of data from a Choice Experiment in the municipality of Milan based on current policy deliverables shows that a large share of the urban population is willing to pay for specific ecological benefits linked to agricultural practices. Organic farming and land strips sown with wildflowers are the two practices whose ecological benefits are found most desirable. Willingness to pay for a policy intervention is shown to significantly correlate with income class, with low income recipients being more interested in organic farming while those with middle or high income deriving higher benefits from planting fast-growing trees.

Although the European Union's (EU) Common Agricultural Policy was intended as sectoral, its recent reforms lead to a stronger territorial vocation, allowing for possible overlaps with the objectives of the Cohesion Policy, the main regional policy of the EU. Through a threshold regression approach, we explore if the possible interactions between these policies influence the agricultural productive performance in more and less developed regions. Results show that in regions with agricultural Gross Value Added per worker lower than 25.53 thousand Euros, both policies exhibit a negative effect, mitigated if they are implemented together. In more productive regions, the effects are the opposite.

The objective of economic, social and territorial cohesion within the European Union has been threatened by the advent of the crisis. Understanding the territorial impact of the crisis at the different spatial levels, from cities to regions to the member states, is necessary to set up the correct policy answer to the threat of a missing convergence in the long-urn. This work attempts to clarify what happened to the process of convergence in the union after the beginning of the 2007 downturn and aims at presenting the weaknesses of this process, that the downturn may have amplified. The ultimate goal is to identify the relevant questions that policy makers urgently need to address to ensure a faster recovery and a more rapid and durable convergence.

The relationship between institutional fragmentation and the spatial extent of cities in Europe’s functional urban areas is examined. European Union planning regulations vary across member states, but in most cases local authorities determine land use within the more general regulatory frameworks set by national or subnational authorities. More decentralized and fragmented settings may favour urban sprawl, allowing developers to avoid land-use restrictions in one municipality by moving to adjacent ones and providing incentives for municipalities to adopt less strict land-conversion regulations to attract households and workers. The empirical results fully support this hypothesis and unveil significant differences between small and large cities, the effect of governance fragmentation being a substantial factor in the latter case.

We estimate the relationship between urban spatial expansion and its socio-economic determinants in Lombardy, the most urbanised region of Italy (and one of the most of the European Union), at the municipality level. Test results suggest that this relationship varies significantly among municipalities of different size and findings support the hypothesis that larger ones are more efficient in managing land take. In particular, we find that the marginal land consumption per new household is inversely related to the size of the municipality and we link this evidence to the fact that, since more space is often available, small municipalities pay less institutional attention to the issue of land take and consequently internalise less the environmental externalities. This evidence calls for a reflection on the role of planning policies and the effectiveness of undifferentiated measures to contain land take, especially in the case of Italy, where the municipalities, more than 99% of which have less than 50,000 inhabitants, decide on land use transformations.

The accumulation of knowledge, human capital and agglomeration are indicated as prominent sources of externalities. Therefore, this study examines their contributions to the economic growth of regions in Europe, while accounting for non-linear and threshold effects as well as spatial dependence. The results highlight differentiated growth patterns for less and more developed regions with the effect of knowledge being considerable only in the latter group. The findings suggest that there is the potential for innovation and agglomeration in many less developed regions located in both the new member states (NMS) and the old member states (OMS). However, to reach sustained growth, structural change is necessary in these regions. We conclude that the existing gaps in the economic structure are deemed responsible for the persistence of income disparities. This reinforces the call for specific policy actions in catching-up regions, thus strengthening the arguments in favour of a place-based approach to regional policy.

The empirical literature suggests that farmland prices and rents capitalise agricultural subsidies and that the 2003 reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy, which decoupled subsidies from production and attached them to land, may have increased the extent of the phenomenon. Employing a farm-level dataset, the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) for Italy, we investigate this issue while accounting for selectivity, endogeneity and unobserved individual heterogeneity. To understand the impact of the reform we compare the estimates of capitalisation rate for decoupled payments with those for coupled payments. After correcting for unobserved individual heterogeneity and selectivity, our results reveal no capitalisation of coupled payments and only limited capitalisation of decoupled area payments into farmland rents in Italy.

Economic theory predicts that the equilibrium of different economic forces explains the spatial scale of a city more than the uncontrolled take of agricultural land, which is considered instead as urban sprawl. A wide range of empirical results based on US data for large urban areas supports this hypothesis, showing that the socio-economic and environmental forces explain a vast portion of the variation in urbanization across cities. In this paper, we ask whether these socio-economic forces are relevant also in small cities and if they are in a different manner, provided that sprawling phenomena may occur more easily in small areas due to the larger availability of agricultural land. To answer the question, we estimate the relationship between city size and the socio-economic and environmental forces using data for small and large municipalities in the Lombardy region, Italy, and test to what extent this model is apt to explain size variations. We find that the model is adequate also in the case of small cities but differentiating small from large cities suggests that the sprawl hypothesis cannot be ruled out by the empirical evidence as the process of land conversion from agricultural to urban is substantially faster in small and medium-sized cities compared to large ones.

According to FAO, there are 805 million undernourished people in the world, and although this number overall has shrunk substantially in the last decades, food poverty continues to be concentrated in some specific countries and regions of the world. Starting from the analysis of the different policy approaches to the issue of food nutrition and security, it is argued in this works that territorial approaches based on capacity building, social innovation and the development of rural institutions are probably the best answer to the growing need of reducing food poverty. The focus here is on rural institutions, among which in particular the agricultural cooperatives, that, in rural territories, are commonly subject to a trade-off between economic efficacy and social inclusion. An analysis of the empirical literature concludes that, notwithstanding the trade-off, agricultural cooperatives can be effective also when they are socially inclusive and that inclusiveness approach best serves the objective of contrasting food poverty.

Food is one of the issue that particularly engage us, especially in the more developed countries; we have only to look at how much space is dedicated to it in newspapers, magazines, and radio and television broadcasts. It has thus been chosen as the theme for the Universal Exposition of 2015 - Expo 2015 - in Milan. There has of course been growing awareness of the links between climate change, the pressure on natural resources, dem ographic growth, the depopulation of rural areas, some populations' access to diets that are richer in animal protein, and how all these elements demand a thorough overhaul of the systems for agricultural production, both in developing countries and in developed countries.

Il progetto è stato condotto in tre aree differenti dal punto di vista geografico e socio-ambientale (Italia, India e Repubblica Democratica del Congo), al fine di individuare modalità appropriate per garantire produzioni agricole adeguate alle esigenze nutrizionali e allo sviluppo locale nel rispetto dell'ambiente.

In agglomeration studies the effects of various regional externalities related to knowledge spillovers remain largely unclear. To explain innovation clustering, scholars emphasize the contribution of localized knowledge spillovers (LKS) and, specifically when estimating the knowledge production function (KPF), of (interregional) research spillovers. However, less attention is paid to other causes of spatial heterogeneity. In applied works, spatial association in data is econometrically related to evidence of research spillovers. This paper argues that, in a KPF setting, omitting spatial heterogeneity might lead to biased estimates of the effect of research spillovers. As an empirical test, a spatial KPF is estimated using EU-25 regional data, including a spatial trend to control for unexplained spatial variation in innovation. Accounting for geographical characteristics substantially weakens evidence of interregional research spillovers.

Sustainability of agriculture is challenged by increasing sprawl in urban agglomerations. Under increasing agglomeration economies in large and even medium sized cities, more and more soil is being subtracted to agriculture, depriving agricultural activities of the main production factor. The extent to which the expanding urbanization threatens agricultural development depends on the urban spatial structure, however. In this work it is empirically investigated how the relationship between soil use and soil consumption is shaped by the compactness of a city. For the population of LAU1 (province) main cities in an Italian region (Lombardy), compactness is measured as the density gradient and estimated using Central Business District models. It is found that more compact cities exhibit relatively lower-than-expected soil consumption in the period 1999-2007. Results suggest that agglomeration economies are not enemies of agricultural activities per se. Nonetheless, urbanization needs to be accompanied by urban fringe containment.

This paper looks at the dynamic of income distribution in European regions and attempts to relate movements within the distribution to the regional structural characteristics and the support of Cohesion Policy (CP). Empirical evidence highlights two main features of regional development. A generally lagging periphery with high growth rates on the one hand and a set of leading regions facing the challenge of global competitiveness on the other. There is evidence that CP support advanced economic development in lagging and peripheral regions, hence contributing to the “convergence objective”. Nonetheless, effective catch-up remains circumscribed to certain very few regions. Contrarily, CP support has failed to stimulate growth potential in leading regions, failing to strengthen EU competitiveness. Evidence presented in this paper provide useful insights for the current debate about the reshaping of EU cohesion policy toward a more place-based approach.

Investment support measures in agriculture can have differentiated effects on the strategic reorganisation and the performance of farms. In this paper, we study the patterns of technical change of a sample of farms in the Lombardy region, Italy, that invested in structural modernisation benefiting from the financial incentives provided under the measure 121. We find evidence relating the modernisation of farms under the umbrella of the measure 121 to limited positive changes in farmland and more substantial positive changes in other inputs. The results are not conclusive regarding a causal relationship between the measure 121 and the structural change of farms. Nonetheless, the paper describes a situation in which patterns of farmland reduction are relatively less frequent in farms that make use of this policy instrument.

The paper develops a comparative analysis, among selected European Union Member States, of the investment demand, for farm buildings and machinery and equipment, of a sample of specialised arable crop farms as determined – inter alia – by different types and levels of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) support. The empirical analysis investigates the role of long and short run determinants of investment levels as well as accounts for the presence of irregularities in the cost adjustment function due to the existence of threshold-type behaviours. Throughout the estimated models a consistent and significant long-run dynamic adjustment towards lower levels of the farms’ capital stocks is detected. The effect of CAP support on both types of investments is positive, although seldom significant.

The chapter develops a comparative analysis, among selected European Union Member States, of the investment demand, for farm buildings and machinery and equipment, of a sample of specialised arable crop farms as determined – inter alia – by different types and levels of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) support. The empirical analysis investigates the role of long and short run determinants of investment levels as well as accounts for the presence of irregularities in the cost adjustment function due to the existence of threshold-type behaviours. Throughout the estimated models a consistent and significant long-run dynamic adjustment towards lower levels of the farms’ capital stocks is detected. The effect of CAP support on both types of investments is positive, although seldom significant. The elasticities of average net investment with respect to CAP payments are employed to simulate the effects of the recently proposed, reductions in the Pillar I CAP Direct Payments (DPs). Since these reform options imply, almost exclusively, a reduction in the level of support granted through DPs, simulated effects largely respect the expectation of a worsening of the farm investment prospects for both asset types (i.e., a larger negative investment or a smaller positive one). Notable exceptions concern investment in machinery and equipment in France and Italy which improve, irrespectively of the magnitude of the implemented cuts in DPs.

Human capital, knowledge accumulation and agglomeration externalities are indicated as prominent sources of increasing returns. Their simultaneous contribution to regional development is investigated in this paper accounting for non-linearity, threshold effects and spatial dependence. Based on EU25 regional data (1995-2007), results highlight differentiated growth patterns for less and more developed regions, the effect of externalities being considerable in the latter case. The evidence weakly relate externalities to agglomeration, suggesting it is neither necessary nor sufficient for regional growth. Externalities are, oppositely, related to knowledge accumulation and human capital. With this respect, existing gaps are identified as the most relevant cause of the economic disadvantage of lagging regions. This, in turn, strengthens the arguments in favour of a place-based approach to regional policy.

In this paper we present a data-driven methodology to classify the territories according to the urban structure of municipalities in absence of reliable commuting data. The methodology is grounded on the Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) and the objective is twofold. On the one side we aim at detecting polycentric urban systems by defining their boundaries. On the other side we seek to identify the presence of mono-centric cities in less urbanized areas. Such a classification is necessary to further extend the analysis to the role of peri-urban territories in different urban frameworks. The choice to rely on ESDA is motivated by the necessity to account for spatial association in statistical description of urbanization-related variables. The presence of functional relations among territories is likely to determine, in fact, the spatial clustering of zones with similar characteristics in terms of degree of urbanization. In absence of functional relations data, cluster detection demonstrates to be a powerful tool for the identification of urban systems. The tool is used to study the spatial distribution of soil use for urbanization purposes in the Lombardy Region, in Italy. The Lombardy region provides an interesting example of co-existence of a variety of urban typologies. First of all, the city of Milan, the largest in the region with more than 1300000 inhabitants . The area surrounding Milan is the most urbanized in the region, although very specific agricultural activities also characterize the periphery. Secondly there are other main cities such as Varese, Bergamo and Brescia, still very densely populated – less than Milan – and whose activities are highly interconnected with the economy of Milan. Finally there are other cities such as Cremona, Mantova, Lodi and Pavia located in the countryside in the southern part of the region, characterized by specialized agricultures. Accordingly, for the Lombardy region, we expect peri-urban areas – whatever its defin