This paper provides evidence on the role of net fiscal transfers to households and EU structural funds for per-capita output convergence across a large sample of European regions during the period 1995-2005. We find that net fiscal transfers, while achieving regional redistribution, seem to...

Despite its rather broad goal of promoting "economic, social and territorial cohesion", the existing literature has mainly focused on investigating the Cohesion Policy's growth effects. This ignores the fact that part of the EU expenditures is directly aimed at reducing disparities in the...

The European Union (EU) provides grants to disadvantaged regions of member states to allow them to catch up with the EU average. Under the Objective 1 scheme, NUTS2 regions with a GDP per capita level below 75% of the EU average qualify for structural funds transfers from the central EU budget....

We explore the role of the transfers that UK regions received from the European structural and cohesion funds, as well as other economic and social factors, in determining the support for the Remain vote in the Brexit referendum, and that past European transfers have played virtually no role in...

The additionality principle says that the funds of the European Union should not replace, but be an addition to national regional policy funds. The benchmark for the co-funding is that the EU bears 50% of total costs associated with regional projects eligible for EU support. In some regions,...

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...

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....

The research agenda of Europeanization is currently highly focused on issued related to what accounts for the 'horizontal' interaction between domestic actors and how these actors make use of stimuli originating from the EU. This paper aims to contribute to this line of inquiry through the case...

While much research on China has focused on rural to urban migration and transitions of rural households away from agriculture, little is known about the changes within the rural agricultural sector. Yet, the agricultural sector continues to account for a large share of employment. We study the...

What determines the development of rural financial markets? Starting from a simple theoretical framework, we derive the factors shaping the market entry of rural microfinance institutions across time and space. We provide empirical evidence for these determinants using the expansion of credit...