Davide Vannoni

This article examines whether circular economy (CE) strategies enhance firm resilience after systemic shocks. Building on the natural resource-based view, we argue that CE investments made before COVID-19 can strengthen resilience by converting sustainability-oriented capabilities into absorptive and adaptive capabilities. Yet this conversion is not automatic: it depends on firms’ ability to manage three tensions between efficiency and redundancy, continuity and reconfiguration, and strategic flexibility and coordinated commitment. We test these arguments using survey data on Italian firms matched with administrative financial records and estimate ordered probit models of post-shock recovery. The results show that pre-pandemic CE investments are positively associated with firm resilience. This relationship is strongest among multinational enterprises, weaker among other firms engaged in international activities, and not statistically significant among domestic firms. We also find that upstream CE strategies are more strongly associated with resilience than downstream strategies, particularly for multinational enterprises. Overall, the findings suggest that CE contributes to resilience when firms possess the organizational and international capabilities needed to govern, integrate, and reconfigure circular practices under disruption.

People’s attitudes about how paid and unpaid work should be divided between the members of a couple determine gendered socioeconomic outcomes to a great extent. It is thus important to understand how gender role attitudes (GRA) are formed and evolve. This article concentrates on a path-breaking event in life: becoming a parent. Using longitudinal data from the United Kingdom, the study shows that, in general, becoming a parent significantly shifts women’s GRA toward more traditional positions but leaves men’s attitudes unaffected. Prenatal attitudes are a critical factor. After parenthood occurs, results find a substantial traditionalization of attitudes for (both) progressive parents, while no significant change is observed for parents with conservative prenatal attitudes. Novel analyses show that the traditionalization of attitudes for progressive individuals, after they become parents, is stronger as postnatal arrangements in the division of paid and unpaid work are more traditional. HIGHLIGHTS

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 paper explores the link between voters’ information, corruption, and efficiency in the context of a career concern model, where politically connected local monopolies are in charge of the provision of a local public service. We find that both a corrupt environment and a low level of voters’ information on managerial actions induce managers to reduce effort levels, thereby contributing to drive down efficiency. We test our predictions using data on solid waste management services provided by a large sample of Italian municipalities. We estimate a stochastic cost frontier model that provides robust evidence that services produced in more corrupted regions with low voters’ information are substantially less cost-efficient.