How to break the populist wave? With the elections to the European Parliament ahead, and the Presidential Elections in the US looming, this question bothers policymakers in many Western democracies. Our study shows that regional policies effectively decrease populist support. Specifically, EU...

This paper shows that regional policies can decrease populist support. We focus on the "development objective" (Objective-1) of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), meant to support lagging-behind regions. For causal inference, we exploit three sources of quasi-exogenous variation in a...

In this paper we investigate the role of EU structural funds in promoting economic growth of Italian provinces (NUTS 3), and whether a more developed local banking sector may expedite the process. We focus on total value added growth for the period 2000-2019, and employ a panel growth regression...