By applying the smile curve concept to regional value added growth rather than to levels, the paper claims that local value-added growth increases when a region is specialised in scarce natural resources or scarce human skills within a GVC. Under these circumstances, in fact, the region can...

Recently, there has been a growing interest in newly developed econometric tools to conduct counterfactual analysis when a treated unit experiences a policy intervention, and an artificial control group has to be constructed. Adopting novel penalized synthetic control methods, we quantify the...

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...

As nations struggle to restart their economy after COVID-19 lockdowns, calls to include green investments in a pandemic-related stimulus are growing. Yet little research provides evidence of the effectiveness of a green stimulus. We begin by summarizing recent research on the effectiveness of...

It has been frequently quoted in the literature that one decisive cause of the productive performance of an economy might be infrastructure investment. This paper provides a dual profit theoretical framework of measuring the effects of infrastructure on economic performance in terms of gains in...