Unburdening Regulation : The Impact of Regulatory Simplification on Photovoltaic Adoption in Italy

This paper measures the impact of a series of reforms enacted by a subset of Italian regions from 2009 to 2013 that dramatically simplified the authorization procedure for investment in medium-sized photovoltaic (PV) plants, i.e. plants with an installed capacity of between 20 and 200 kW. We rely on georeferenced administrative data on nearly all of the PV plants built in Italy, and employ a stacked border diff-in-diff method. We compare the change in PV installations following the implementation of the simplification reforms between municipalities located close to the border in regions where the reforms were introduced and those located in neighbouring regions that did not implement the reforms. We find that simplification reforms increased the installed capacity in medium-sized plants by 29 percentage points. This resulted in 12 extra MW installed per quarter, which equates to about 10% of the average quarterly installed capacity for the same category of plants during 2009-2013