A DDF bootstrapped framework for estimating ecoefficiency: The influence of the financial and technological structure in the Italian polluting industries

This paper proposes an estimate of eco-efficiency levels for a large sample of Italian polluting firms, operating in five different industrial sectors and subject to the same European normative framework. Emission data come from reliable public sources and a non-parametric directional distance function (DDF) is applied to estimate overall performance for what concerns pollution. In addition, the scarcity of data allow authors to apply a bootstrap methodology in order to improve the robustness of estimates..Indeed, interesting dynamics emerge among industries and some hypotheses are tested using a second stage analysis based on extensions of the Simar and Wilson (2007) contribution. The economic and financial structure of the firms has a significant explanatory power in relation to environmental performance, and the same holds true for compliance costs computed within the DDF bootstrapped framework.