We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose...

By studying the interaction between social capital and decentralization, we show that political decentralization can be a source of divergence across heterogeneous regions. In particular, we claim that since the local endowments of social capital display their effect on the economy mainly...

We investigate the relationship between diversity and productivity in Europe using an original dataset covering the NUTS 3 regions of 12 countries of the EU15 (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, former Western Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional performance calculated using data on the provision of different areas of public services. In order to address...

Some recent papers by Dell et al. (2009) and Dell et al. (2012) (DJO) relating weather and economic outcomes, have delivered meaningful messages with clear implications to the effects of a changing climate. In a nutshell, the authors claim that a 1°C increase in global average temperatures...

Industrial clusters, which are commonly targeted to receive financial support allocated to locally based development projects, are seen as an effective industrial policy tool for improving productivity and generating employment. Nevertheless, identifying clusters and assessing their economic...

We analyze the extent to which endogenous cultural amenities affect the spatial equilibrium share of high-human-capital employees. To overcome endogeneity, we draw on a quasi-natural experiment in German history and exploit the exogenous spatial distribution of baroque opera houses built as a...

We investigate the effect of rising temperatures on economic development, using sub-national data for approximately 1,500 sub-national regions in 81 countries from the 1950s to the 2010s. Accounting for region- and time-fixed factors by means of a two-way fixed effects panel approach, we find no...

In this paper we study the dynamics of local employment growth in West Germany from 1980 to 2001. Using dynamic panel techniques, we analyse the timing of the impact of diversity and specialisation, as well as of the human capital structure of local industries. Diversity has a positive effect on...

This paper analyses the effects of the EU Cohesion Policy (CP) on the economic growth of 276 European NUTS-2 regions between 2008 and 2016. Using a structural equation model (SEM) consisting of both a measurement component (with two latent variables) and a structural component, we estimate the...