More than one third of the European Union's total budget is spent on socalled Cohesion Policy via the structural funds. Its main purpose is to promote the development of the EU and to support convergence between the levels of development of the various European regions. Investigating the impact...

This paper investigates whether the local infrastructure favours entrepreneurial activities. Besides the physical and knowledge infrastructure we take into account a county's broadband availability by building an index which accounts for county-related specificities. We find that broadband...

For the case of the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, production and employment effects of the promotion of renewable energy sources are examined based on a regionalized input-output table. Our findings suggest that policy actions promoting renewable energy types do not necessarily create new...

Demographic change is expected to affect labour markets in very different ways on a regional scale. The objective of this paper is to explore the spatio-temporal patterns of recent distributional changes in the workers age structure, innovation output and skill composition for German regions by...

The question whether agglomeration externalities arise either from specialization or diversification of economic activity has since long been a major topic in the analysis of factors determining economic growth. In this paper we analyze whether a more specialized or a more diverse skill...

This paper adopts a spatial econometric perspective to analyse regional convergence of per capita income in Europe in 1995 to 2000 and, moreover, relaxes the assumption of a single steady-state growth path which appears to be out of tune with reality of empirical dynamics. The two-club spatial...

This paper analyses the growth e®ects of EU structural funds using a new panel dataset of 124 NUTS-1 / NUTS-2 regions over the time period 1995-2005. We extend the current literature with regard to at least three aspects: First of all, we extend the time period of investigation, using...

The current empirical literature on the impact of EU Cohesion Policy on the economic growth rates of the European regions mainly relies on functional form assumptions. However, it is ex ante not clear which functional form is appropriate with regard to the relationship between structural funds...

In the context of EMU fiscal equalization schemes have been proposed as a means to stabilize regions against asymmetric shocks. A theoretical analysis shows that besides reducing the cross-sectional income variance the redistributive element of fiscal equalization causes incentive effects for...

In the paper we analyze the convergence process of the West German Laender from 1970 to 1995 using descriptive tools as well as panel estimation methods. Although there have been some winners in this process, the main finding is that convergence was insufficient in the sense that no gains have...