Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to identify the main factors that explain the profitability of the Italian companies operating in the tobacco industry - i.e. the Italian cigarette manufacturers as well as other firms operating at other levels of the tobacco filière - in the period after the entry into force of the Legislative Decree 184/2003, which implements and transpose the First tobacco product directive. We run our investigation through a panel data regression, relying on AIDA financial data referred to years 2005-2014. In particular, fixed and random effects regressions were run for each of the three different specifications of the model adopted. Though some results are in line with the previous scientific literature, some others show new insights which deserve further research.