The impact of port throughput on local employment: Evidence from a panel of European regions

In this paper we study the impact of port activities on local employment by analyzing a sample of about 560 regions located in ten West European countries and observed over the period 2000–2006. The biggest European ports of OECD countries belong to our sample, which includes 116 ports. The empirical analysis is based on the estimation of a set of employment equations with the GMM-System estimator of Blundell and Bond (1998) that allows us to take into account persistence effects in employment, regional unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity, and endogeneity of port activity.