Does the Quality of Local Institutions Trigger Improvements in Waste Related Performances? New Evidence Based on Italian Municipal Data

This paper focuses on the role of institutional quality and income, together with other potential drivers, in determining sorted and unsorted collection. A Spatial Seemingly Unrelated Regression (spatial-SUR) model is estimated based on a municipallevel dataset. Accounting for spatial spillovers and semi-parametric estimations, we examined nonlinearities in the relation between waste performances and institutional quality, finding a previously overlooked asymmetry in waste performances improvements across municipalities, with underperforming ones improving the most as institutional quality improves. On the other hand, and somehow surprisingly, institutional quality improvements yield similar effects between average- and best-performing municipalities in terms of waste collection.