The paper analyses the causal effect of capital subsidies on firms' efficiency and productivity by exploiting the conditions for a local random experiment created by Law 488/92 (henceforth L488), which has been an important policy instrument for reducing territorial disparities in Italy. The...

Following the political economics literature documenting how public resources are likely to be geographically distributed along equity and efficiency as well as political considerations, this article is aimed at exploring to what extent, and through which channels, politics play a role in...

There is still little consensus on the effectiveness of business support policies. The empirical evaluation is complicated by the difficulty in achieving reliable identification. We analyse the impact of Law 488/92, the main Italian regional policy. We propose a new approach, named multiple...

Since the beginning of 2010, European Commission has launched the new strategic framework for Europe, which is now known as the "Europe 2020 Strategy". This new strategy has been set as the successor of the so called "Lisbon-Gothenburg Strategy" which was set in early '00 as the strategy for...

Gender equality has long been a focus in regional development in the European Union. In a Swedish context, the interest has been borne from the fact that rural and sparsely populated areas have a 'women shortage', and that this tendency is accelerating as young women move to cities, while young...

Nowadays, more and more scholars of regional science are interested in the role of agglomeration economies in the knowledge-based economy. This issue can be dealt with from different points of view: the competitive type of functional or nodal regions and one has to examine the factors...

This paper describes some of the features of a new dynamic general equilibrium framework (RHOMOLO) being developed at the European Commission (JRC-IPTS, together with DG REGIO) for evaluating EU Cohesion Policy. The design of the model reflects the objectives of Cohesion Policy, and a broader...

Cohesion policy and regional policy as a main part of cohesion policy are the most important policies of European Union. This could also be view from the volume of financial resources allocated for these policies. One of the main current research issues is analyzing efficiency and effectiveness...

This paper examines the existence of regional agglomerations of manufacturing, service and creative industries, the relationship between these industries and the wealth of regions and their industrial structure. Through an analysis of 250 European regions, three important conclusions can be...

We investigate the effectiveness of European Structural Funds on employment, population and house prices in Local Labor Markets (LLM) located in Southern Italy. We exploit the variability in disbursements between 2007 and 2013 and estimate the impact of the interventions by allowing for...