A high level of public services in housing, transport, education and health care is essential for liveability in urban centres, as shown in this report, with the help of European data for large cities. Inhabitants of larger cities, where the housing market is heavily commercialised in terms of...

This paper revisits the hypothesis that landlocked regions are systematically poorer than regions with ocean access, using panel data for 1,527 subnational regions in 83 nations from 1950-2014. This data structure allows us to exploit within-country-time variation only (e.g., regional variation...

Within the fundamental determinants of cross-country income inequality, "humanly devised" political institutions represent a hallmark factor that societies can influence, as opposed to, for example, geography. Focusing on the portion of inequality explainable by differences in political...

This paper proposes a simple framework to better understand an opposition group's choice between peace, terrorism, and open civil conflict against the government. Our model implies that terrorism emerges if constraints on the ruling executive group are intermediate and rents are sizeable, hereas...

This paper asks whether we can, from an economic point of view, justify the EU Cohesion Policy. To this end, our research - using structural equation modelling, macro-economic modelling and regional inputoutput analysis - found a) positive dynamic effects of Cohesion Policy on regional growth,...

Closing the prosperity gap between regions has always been a key political aspiration of the European Union - and cohesion policy is the primary means to achieve that goal. Europe is currently undergoing a digital and green transition that is drastically changing the way its economy works. How...

The euro area will not have a centralised budget and smoothing of country-specific asymmetric shocks via private financial markets will develop only slowly. Mistrust among the governments has caused rigid, even pro-cyclical fiscal policies. Smoothing mechanisms are absent due to the fear that...

In this paper, sound public finances under the euro means sustainability in the long term instead of short- and medium-term fiscal discipline. The challenges to sustainability are identified for the four largest euro area member states, and several policy options for sustainability are...