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The paper aims at addressing the following research questions: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency? And which pillars of institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

By specifying a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method where GHG emissions are considered as the bad output and the GDP is referred as the desirable one, the work computes the environmental efficiency into the appraisal of a production function for the European countries over three decades.

According to the countries' performance, the findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries. In this environmental context, the role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries.

This article attempts to analyze the role of different dimensions of institutional quality in different European countries' performance – in terms of mitigating GHGs (undesirable output) – while trying to raise their economic performance through their GDP (desirable output).

1. The paper aims at addressing the following research question: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

2. We adopt a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method, considering 40 European economies over a 30-year time interval.

3. The findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries.

4. The role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries, while the performance decreases for the low middle-income countries.

The paper aims at addressing the following research question: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

We adopt a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method, considering 40 European economies over a 30-year time interval.

The findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries.

The role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries, while the performance decreases for the low middle-income countries.

The price of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) is highly subjected to variability. In this way, the consumer is not able to perceive a price of reference. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this topic, trying to define a range suitable for the selling of EVOO.

A mathematical model is applied to the three price levels (i.e. production, intermediate and selling). It studies the relationship among main variables: purchase cost of olives, the production cost of olive oil, the yield of olives obtained by the technological process and the profit margin. To define the input data, 25 producers of olives and 25 owners of olive oil mills are involved.

The production of EVOO depends strictly on the production of olives, which typically is subdivided in a year of “high production” and in a year of “low production.” The price of EVOO is subjected to a great variability; however, it is possible to propose a range that varies from €7.0 per liter to €8.7 per liter.

The level of acidity influences significantly the quality of olive oil, and this model has the limit to not analyze the variation of the price in function of this parameter.

This study is the first to propose a pricing model to evaluate EVOO. The literature section supports this assumption.

This paper sets out to investigate investors' sustainable preferences under different market conditions. Specifically, the authors examine the existence of a positive sustainable asset pricing gap, and whether it is influenced by the socioeconomic and financial sentiments. The increase of uncertainty rises investors' skepticism whether sustainable companies are under-performing the traditional counterparts, causing larger increasing gap. Conversely, if sustainable assets are overperforming, the increase of market uncertainty raises investors' sustainable preferences.

The authors examine the existence of a positive sustainable asset pricing gap, and whether it is influenced by the socioeconomic and financial sentiments. Through a quantile regression, the authors remark the variability of sustainable preferences where market participants, although recognizing the present and future value added of sustainable investing, also show skepticism (i.e. asymmetric tail behavior). However, the analysis of the total change of sustainable investments returns over time demonstrates the emergence of positive viewpoints incentivized by economic and market uncertainty.

The market-driven social responsibility exalts the positive insights regarding the future of sustainable developments. As the authors discuss along the paper, investors are gaining awareness about the environmental and social goals pursued by socially responsible companies. Hence, the authors consider how economic instability might stimulate the assessment of the social and environmental impact of the unsustainable production systems, switching investments toward virtuous sustainable companies. This could generate a series of positive externalities that might improve the welfare conditions of the whole society.

The authors conduct an original empirical exercise, combining different techniques (i.e. quantile regressions and wavelet analysis). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper trying to evidence a systematic connection between market uncertainty and sustainable preferences accounting for different market states (thanks to quantile regressions).