Economic activity tends to cluster. This results in productivity gains. For policy makers this offers an opportunity to formulate and promote policies that foster clustering of economic activity. Paradoxically, although agglomeration rents are often found in empirical research a rationale for...

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,...

A national-champions-related industrial policy has become (again) en vogue among European politicians. Against this background, our work orders different types of national champions along the industry lifecycle. Different types of locally bound externalities appear along the lifecycle. In a...

We explore the impact of an EU-wide nuclear phase-out by 2030 provided the EU energy and climate policy for 2030 is implemented. Using a numerical simulation model of the European energy industry (LIBEMOD), we find that a complete nuclear phase-out in Europe by 2030 has a moderate impact on...

The paper provides a comparative analysis of the association between student achievement and public-private partnerships (PPPs) in schooling across countries. Student-level data from the PISA international achievement test provides information on the public-private character of both operation...

This paper analyzes the impact of fiscal competition through infrastructure in a New Economic Geography framework. It is shown that regional competition leads to convergence if the trade costs are high but induces divergence if trade cost have fallen below a certain value. Moreover, fiscal...

We estimate the impact of local mining activity on the business constraints experienced by 22,150 firms across eight resource-rich countries. We find that with the presence of active mines, the business environment in the immediate vicinity (20 km) of a firm deteriorates but business constraints...

Applying the methodology developed by Duranton and Overman (2005, 2008), we analyze localization and dispersion of firms in China. Using a unique and detailed dataset on manufacturing firms in China, we are able to follow the changes in location patterns of firms between 2002 and 2008. Our...

We empirically investigate the existence of spatial autocorrelation between military dictatorships in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1977 through 2007. We apply a Bayesian SAR probit regression, extended to a pooled model. We find a robust and positive spatial autocorrelation coefficient, which shows a...