“…Policy makers, in Italy, alongside the traditional enforcement tools (e.g., probability of detection, severity of punishment) should give stronger consideration to the promotion of educational policy able to increase awareness of the environmental wealth, as an indirect channel to reduce environmental crimes. These findings appear to concur with those in other studies (Usher, 1997;Kountouris and Remoundou, 2016) that show that education improves the understanding of social values and develops a sense of belonging to the community promoting virtues related to work and honesty; this is consistent with the mechanisms of positive externalities associated, above all, with human capital in the new growth theories (Lucas, 1988) for which investments in human capital increase the productivity of labour that has a positive contribution on the output growth. Along this line, Amore et al (2019) have recently demonstrated that CEO education is associated with greater environmental awareness (i.e., highly educated CEOs exhibit greater concerns for climate change and significantly improve firms' energy efficiency) confirming the argument that education is not only beneficial for individuals but may generate benefits for the entire society (Krueger and Lindahl, 2001).…”