The aim of this paper is to empirically identify convergence clubs in per capita incomes of European regions and to investigate whether initial conditions - as suggested by the club convergence hypothesis - are responsible for club formation. To tackle this issue, we propose a two-step procedure...

This paper assesses whether the linkages between R&D, human capital and productivity growth in a panel of EU manufacturing industries over the period 1980-2002 are affected by a critical level of human capital. To employ our data in an efficient manner, the study makes use of a dynamic...

This paper demonstrates that, unlike what the conventional wisdom says, measurement error biases in panel data estimation of convergence using OLS with fixed effects are huge, not trivial. It does so by way of the "skipping estimation": taking data from every m years of the sample (where m is an...

The study examines the relationship between the regulatory variables and economic growth on the basis of Bayesian model pooling applied to Blundell and Bond’s GMM system estimator. The areas of regulations (institutions) are measured by the following indicators: index of economic freedom,...

Despite its rather broad goal of promoting 'economic, social and territorial cohesion', the existing literature has mainly focused on investigating the Cohesion Policy's growth effects. This ignores the fact that part of the EU expenditures is directly aimed at reducing disparities in the...

Despite its rather broad goal of promoting "economic, social and territorial cohesion", the existing literature has mainly focused on investigating the Cohesion Policy's growth effects. This ignores the fact that part of the EU expenditures is directly aimed at reducing disparities in the...

More than one third of the European Union's total budget is spent on socalled Cohesion Policy via the structural funds. Its main purpose is to promote the development of the EU and to support convergence between the levels of development of the various European regions. Investigating the impact...

This paper analyzes the impact of the German structure program "Joint Task for the Improvement of Regional Economic Structures" (GRW) on regional economic growth. The paper extends the existing literature by several aspects. First of all, using the popular augmented Solow model by Mankiw et al....

We estimate the speed of income convergence for a sample of 196 European NUTS 2 regions over the period 1985-1999. So far there is no direct estimator available for dynamic panels with strong spatial dependencies. We propose a two-step procedure, which involves first spatial filtering of the...

This paper studies the convergence of per-capita GDP across European regions over a fairly long period. Most of the works in the field are based on either cross-sectional or fixed-effects estimates. We propose the estimation of convergence in per-capita GDP across European regions by making use...