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 during 2009–2013 that dramatically simplified the authorisation procedure for investment into mid-sized to large sized photovoltaic plants, i.e. plants with capacity installed between 20 and 200 kW. We rely on georeferenced administrative data on nearly the universe of photovoltaic plants built in Italy, and employ a stacked border diff-in-diff around the time of the regional reforms and municipalities located close to the border of regions that implemented them. We find that simplification reforms increased by 29 percentage points the capacity installed in medium-to-large plants, which resulted into 12 extra MW installed per quarter, about 10% of average quarterly installations for the same category of plants during 2009–2013.