An increasingly popular instrument for solving environmental problems is the "public voluntary agreement (VA)", in which government offers modest technical assistance and positive publicity to firms that reach certain environmental goals. Prior papers treat such agreements as a superior,...

Using data on the 20 Italian regions for the period 1970-1995, I examine whether the presence of social capital, as reflected in a number of different measures collected by Putnam (1993), affects economic productivity. I find three types of effects. First, social capital, when treated as an...