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The term “charity hazard” refers to the issue of the crowding out of insurance by co-existing relief programs in the context of different institutional governmental disaster schemes. In this context, the aim of this paper is to verify if the charity hazard phenomenon exists in the Italian agricultural insurance scheme.

Annual data regarding crop insurance, subsidies and farm structure were extracted from ISMEA, ISTAT and FADN databases. A SYS-GMM dynamic panel model was estimated, considering the 2010–2017 time period and the Italian Regions as units of the analysis.

The empirical results highlight a negative relation between crop subsidies and the farmers' policies and total premium paid. The disincentive and crowd-out effects of public aid and subsidies on the choice of whether or not to take out an agricultural insurance policy ends up being one of the key factors for the low level of penetration of the agricultural insurance in Italy.

Since the diffusion of agricultural insurance can contribute to the general objective of sustainability and resilience, the implementation of alternative solutions to subsidies could be needed (e.g. the introduction of mandatory insurance against adversities or financial support for a geographically specific insurance tool).

Investigating empirically the determinants of the agricultural insurance policy diffusion among the Italian Regions, this study ensures an original contribution to the scientific progress in the field, demonstrating the existence of charity hazard caused by the public subsidies provision.

Recent economic research has focused on the economic effects of the social environment. In the economic literature, important phenomena are considered, at least in part, as results of the individual's social environment. There is a similar revival of interest among economists who analyse the world of science and basic research. In this case as well, the environment plays a key role in the agent's behaviour. This paper aims at an empirical analysis of the influence of social interactions on scientists' productivity.

In the econometric analysis the authors investigate the aggregate importance of social interactions in science through the analysis of data on publications in four scientific fields of seven advanced countries. The paper builds a dynamic autoregressive model which provides long‐run multipliers. The model is estimated with a panel fixed effects methodology.

Social interactions among researchers have positive effects on a scientist's productivity, and there is a U‐shaped relation between the size of a scientific network and individual productivity. This result is interpreted as providing evidence for threshold externalities and increasing returns to scale.

Other better indicators of social interactions in science should be found and used in estimates. The set of countries and fields should be enlarged.

The paper represents the first econometric investigation of the issue at country level, and provides interesting results which are new for the economic literature.

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the main dynamics of the Italian food system, focusing on the relationships between the inclination to innovate and a set of firm characteristics.

The empirical analysis includes two steps. In the first, principal component analysis is carried out in order to identify factors that can explain the features that differentiate Italian food firms. In the second phase the role of such factors on innovation behaviour is quantified by means of a logit model.

The empirical analysis showed that, in the Italian food sector, innovation adoption follows different patterns when product or process innovation is considered. In particular, the probability of introducing product innovation is influenced by the quality of human capital, the geographical context and, to a lesser extent, the age of the firm.

The research is restricted in so far as it only considers the Italian food sector. Because the data survey is representative only at the level of the manufacturing industry as a whole and excludes firms with fewer than ten employees, the analysis for the food sector can only be indicative.

This paper provides a useful source of knowledge on the innovative behaviour of Italian firms. This highlights the need to provide for diversified intervention strategies to stimulate and enforce innovation in the Italian food sector.

The research provides some initial insight into firm perspectives in the role of innovations to enhance firms’ market competitiveness.