This paper studies the impact of port activity on regional employment, analysing approximately 560 western European regions, including the largest OECD European ports (116 ports), from 2000-06. The empirical analysis is based on a set of employment equations using the Blundell and Bond (1998)...

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 exploit employment data from 10,528 parishes across nineteenth century England and Wales and find that a one standard deviation increase in finance employment increases the annualized growth rate of secondary labour by 0.8 percentage points. An endogenous growth model with finance and...

We analyze the impact of EU structural and cohesion funds on economic growth of European regions, using 2SLS to tackle the potential problem of endogeneity, and estimating a spatial model to account for inter-regional spillovers. We use the presence of environmentally protected areas (under the...

An emerging literature on the geography of bohemians argues that a region's lifestyle and cultural amenities explain, at least partly, the unequal distribution of highly qualified people across space, which in turn, explains geographic disparities in economic growth. However, to date, there has...

The present work investigates the relationship between municipal fragmentation and regional per capita GDP growth rate, using a panel of OECD TL2 regions in the period 1996-2011. According to the fiscal decentralisation literature, fragmentation should enhance growth as local government closer...

The purpose of this paper is to understand how income inequality is associated with economic growth in OECD regions and whether the degree and type of urban concentration affects this relationship. Both income inequality and urban concentration can be seen as patterns of resource allocation that...

This paper sets out to examine the impact of the quality of local and regional governments on the returns of investment, focusing on the returns of EU structural and cohesion funds. Despite the widespread belief that the quality of government affects the returns of public investments, whether...

This paper benchmarks the performance of OECD rural regions with other types of OECD regions over the period 1995-2010. OECD regions are classified into three types according to the OECD regional typology and into four types according to the extended OECD typology. The latter classifies rural...