<title>Abstract</title> In undertaking an analysis of neighbouring effects on European regional patterns of specialization, this paper makes two main contributions to the literature. First, we use a spatial weight matrix that takes into consideration membership of an EU cross-border regional association. We...

<em>Explaining within-country Regional Inequality in the European Union</em> A Kuznetsian regional convergence process is estimated for within-country inequality in the European Union for the period 1986-1998. As a novelty, the estimation takes account of the correct functional form, because inequality...

We examine the relationship between high-school students’ height and their self-reported school satisfaction. This relationship is explored on the basis of a survey conducted in 2008 among some 2200 Catalan (Spanish) students. We find a negative association between height and school...

One of the challenges facing regional policy in the European Union is the accession of new countries to the Single Market and to Economic and Monetary Union. Conditions in many of these East European regions are worse than in the least developed regions of the fifteen existing member states....

Growth literature has considered the existence of groups of economies that have been termed convergence clubs. This paper groups European regions in order to detect whether the existence of convergence clubs can be defended in this context. To this end, we define optimum criteria using an...

A convergence analysis is applied to wages and productivity for Euro-area countries in the period from 1981 to 2001. The results show a reduction in the dispersion of wages and unit labour costs, but not in productivity. Different patterns are found for real and nominal wages: higher levels of...

In this paper we analyse the effects of the L’Aquila earthquake on labour market outcomes for a period of fifteen months after its occurrence. Our estimates are based on a difference-in-differences strategy that compares residents of L’Aquila with residents of a control area before and...

This article analyzes the contribution of the Spanish fiscal decentralization process to economic growth at both the aggregate and regional levels. Our main conclusion is that at the aggregate level, the process of decentralization of responsibilities to autonomous communities (ACs) has not had...

Recent contributions to the literature on public choice have examined the effects of regional fiscal balances and unsuitable decentralization mechanisms on the capability of regional governments to make expenditure decisions. We focus on Spanish regional case. Our results suggest that, given the...

Growth literature has considered the existence of groups of economies which have been termed convergence clubs. Literature confirms their existence for European regional case. This paper has focused on how conditioning factors are influencing European regional GDPpc distribution. The estimation...