The study presented in the paper attempts to examine if the alleged effectiveness of the developmental funds - one of the main strategic tools of the EU - can be traced in the typical statistics provided by various authorities and organizations. The study focuses in the case of funds used in...

The research in the topic of industrial districts has been focused on the identification of which industries are forming industrial districts and on the causes behind the development of the clusters. As well as there are historical and efficiency reasons that are behind the current configuration...

Developed countries have used several place-based policies to address the socioeconomic underdevelopment of their lagging regions ranging from tax exemptions to soft loans. Among these place-based policies, investment subsidies to private firms are one of the most popular in the EU. However, the...

During the programming period 2007-2013 the Cohesion Policy of EU has adopted and implemented the policy of territorial co-operation between EU Member States but also between EU and third countries. In this framework, the EU co-finances (through the European Regional Development Fund, the...

Migration and work are truly connected notions, both because one major cause of migration is the search of better working conditions, and because work is a fundamental vehicle of social cohesion, especially for the migrants. Hence, the European social model strongly connects social cohesion and...

This paper investigates the effects of tuition fees on the university enrollment and location decision of high school graduates in Germany. After a Federal Constitutional Court decision in 2005, 7 out of 16 German federal states introduced tuition fees for higher education. In the empirical...

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...

Standard program evaluations implicitly assume that individuals are perfectly informed about the considered policy change and the related institutional rules. This seems not very plausible in many contexts, as diverse examples show. However, evidence on how incomplete information affects the...

For more than a decade the unbundling of telecommunications networks has been used as a regulatory means to stifle competition. However, despite its assumed positive effects on market entry and competition intensity, the negative effects on network investment incentives are widely shown in the...

Standard procedures for output gap estimates, such as the Hodrick-Prescott Filter or the Production Function Method, suffer from the sample phase shift issue at the end of the sample. This often provides unstable and unreliable estimates for the current output gap. However the current estimate...