We present a novel approach for analyzing the effects of EU cohesion policy on local economic activity. For all municipalities in the border area of the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland, we collect project-level data on EU funding in the period between 2007 and 2013. Using night light emission...

We tackle the nowcasting problem at the regional level using a large set of indicators (regional, national and international) for the years 1998 to 2013. We explicitly use the ragged-edge data structure and consider the different information sets faced by a regional forecaster within each...

An emerging literature on the geography of bohemians argues that a region's lifestyle and cultural amenities explain, at least partly, the unequal distribution of highly qualified people across space, which in turn, explains geographic disparities in economic growth. However, to date, there has...

This paper develops a simple model that can be used to estimate the effectiveness of Cohesion expenditure relative to similar but unsubsidized projects, thereby making it possible to explicitly test an important assumption that is often implicit in estimates of the impact of Cohesion policies....

Does culture have a causal effect on economic development? The data on European regions suggest that it does. Culture is measured by indicators of individual values and beliefs, such as trust and respect for others, and confidence in individual self-determination. To isolate the exogenous...

This paper shows that Tabellini's recent claim to have provided evidence that culture has a causal effect on economic development is unjustified. Tabellini's claim is based on an instrumental variables analysis in which two instruments are used to identify the supposed causal effect. One of...

This study analyzes how state capacity shapes the local impact of national policies by exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in the regional expansion of the state. It uses the local discontinuity created by the boundary of the largest peasant rebellion in 18th century Russia where the state...

We estimate potential regional industrial effects in case of a threatening gas deficit. For Germany, the reduction leads to a potential decrease in industrial value added by 1.6%. The heterogeneity across German states is remarkable, ranging from 2.2% for Rhineland-Palatinate to 0.7% for...

This paper looks at whether immigration can mitigate the Dutch disease effects associated with booms in natural resource sectors. We first derive predicted changes in the size of the non-tradable sector from a small general-equilibrium model à la Obstfeld-Rogoff, supplemented by a resource...

This paper applies component-wise boosting to the topic of regional economic forecasting. Component-wise boosting is a pre-selection algorithm of indicators for forecasting. By using unique quarterly real gross domestic product data for two German states (the Free State of Saxony and...