Selling the circularity: Investigating the impact of circularity promotion on the performance of Italian manufacturing companies

Silvia Blasi (), Benedetta Crisafulli () and Silvia Rita Sedita ()
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Silvia Blasi: Department of Economics and Management, University of Padova
Benedetta Crisafulli: Department of Management, Birkbeck, University of London

No 259, "Marco Fanno" Working Papers from Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno"

Abstract: Promoting the circularity of business practices and of product offerings represents a pivotal process in increasing the value of circular products and encouraging the market to recognize such a value. This study investigates the communication abilities of companies manifesting an interest in adopting circular economy practices, with the aim to assess the extent to which promoting circularity increases economic performance. Employing a unique web-scraped dataset of Italian circular companies’ websites, we captured and analyzed the online promotional efforts of a unique sample of manufacturing companies. Underpinned by the signaling theory, our estimation results illustrate that the ability of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to signal the circularity of their business practices on the website generally increases performance and such impact is larger among low performing companies. Our study advances knowledge on: 1) the impact of promoting circularity on economic performance, 2) the efficacy of signaling in the context of circular practices’ adoption.

Keywords: circular economy; big data; web scraping; signaling; communication; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M10 M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-ent and nep-ore
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pad:wpaper:0259

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