The additionality principle says that the funds of the European Union should not replace, but be an addition to national regional policy funds. The benchmark for the co-funding is that the EU bears 50% of total costs associated with regional projects eligible for EU support. In some regions,...

The European Union (EU) provides grants to disadvantaged regions of member states to allow them to catch up with the EU average. Under the Objective 1 scheme, NUTS2 regions with a GDP per capita level below 75% of the EU average qualify for structural funds transfers from the central EU budget....

The EU’s cohesion policy should now be confluent with the goals of the Lisbon strategy by promoting growth and employment. In this context, the promotion of a concept called regional innovation system has recently become important in the EU for guaranteeing long-term regional economic growth....

We describe a model that integrates a multi-regional input-output model of the U.S. (50 states and the District of Columbia) with the national highway network. Interstate commodity shipments are placed on a congestible highway network. Simulations of major choke-point disruptions redirect...

If one cluster increases local competitiveness, can politicians, by interlinking clusters, achieve an even better effect at the state level? To answer this question, the paper analyzes the "Cluster Initiative" introduced in 1999 by the Bavarian State Government. The purpose of the initiative was...

In this paper, we investigate the use of interactive effect or linear factor models in regional policy evaluation. We contrast treatment effect estimates obtained by Bai (2009)'s least squares method with the popular difference in differences estimates as well as with estimates obtained using...

We use a quantitative model to study the implications of European integration for welfare and migration flows across 1,318 regions. The model suggests that an increase of trade barriers to the level of 1957 reduces welfare by about 1-2 percent on average, depending on the presumed trade...

We use Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to evaluate the robustness of determinants of economic growth in a new dataset of 255 European regions in the 1995-2005 period. We use three different specifications based on (1) the cross-section of regions, (2) the cross-section of regions with country...

In explaining the uneven spatial distribution of economic activity, urban economics and new economic geography (NEG) dominate recent research in economics. A main difference between these two approaches is that NEG stresses the role of spatial linkages whereas urban economics does not do so. We...

Using a rich data set on the EU regions, we analyze the relevance of two possible determinants of a region's resilience to shocks, the degree of urbanization and specialization. We take the Great Recession, the economic and financial crisis that started in 2008, as our shock and then analyze how...