The European Regional Conference and the Council of the European Communities are both pursuing a regional policy concept which, on the one hand, focuses on the promotion of economic activity in areas of scanty development and, on the other, aims at curbing rather than promoting the development...

This paper painstakingly restores a vintage empirical model of unemployment determination by interacting shocks and institutions, and runs it on recent data featuring dramatic shocks and controversial institutional change. Theoretical insights and empirical results suggest that reforms and...