This article investigates the role of education on environmental crime in Italy using a panel of 110 Italian provinces over the period 2010–2015. We employ a system-GMM (Generalized Method of Moments) dynamic panel data approach to tackle the endogeneity that might arise in the estimations from the environmental crime dynamic path and to consider time-invariant effects on provinces. Our empirical results, even after controlling for socioeconomic and judicial efficiency characteristics, support the existence of a U-inverted relationship between education and environmental crime, which depicts an unconventional finding: At the margin, a higher level of education endowment offsets the propensity to commit environmental crimes, which are confirmed to be white-collar type of crimes. The results are robust to model specifications and endogeneity. Furthermore, to check the robustness of nonmonotonicity in the relationship between environmental crime and education and to control for unobserved provincial heterogeneity, we also exploit a semiparametric fixed effects model. There is wide room for efficiency gains that could arise from policy interventions aiming to put environmental crimes into perspective.

本文使用 2010 年至 2015 年期间意大利 110 个省的小组调查了意大利环境犯罪教育的作用。我们采用系统-GMM（广义矩法）动态面板数据方法来解决环境犯罪动态路径估计中可能出现的内生性，并考虑对省份的时不变影响。我们的实证结果，即使在控制社会经济和司法效率特征后，也支持教育与环境犯罪之间存在 U 型倒转关系，这描绘了一个非常规的发现：在边缘，较高的教育禀赋水平抵消了犯罪倾向环境犯罪，被认定为白领犯罪。结果对于模型规范和内生性是稳健的。此外，为了检查环境犯罪与教育之间关系的非单调性的稳健性并控制未观察到的省级异质性，我们还利用了半参数固定效应模型。旨在将环境犯罪纳入视野的政策干预可能会产生很大的效率提升空间。