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....

The EU's cohesion policy should now be confluent with the goals of the Lisbon strategy by promoting growth and employment. In this context, the promotion of a concept called regional innovation system has recently become important in the EU for guaranteeing long-term regional economic growth....

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...

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,...

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...

This paper shows that Tabellini's recent claim to have provided evidence that culture has a causal effect on economic development is unjustified. Tabellini's claim is based on an instrumental variables analysis in which two instruments are used to identify the supposed causal effect. One of...