Reducing disparities among regions within European countries is the aim of European and national structural policies. In particular, a European grant contributes to the German governmental program for equalizing regional unemployment. The goal is to bring it down to the national average by...

Estimating structural models is often viewed as computationally difficult, an impression partly due to a focus on the nested fixed-point (NFXP) approach. We propose a new constrained optimization approach for structural estimation. We show that our approach and the NFXP algorithm solve the same...