This paper proposes a methodology for measuring the spatial effects of roads and the seats of local authorities on the diffusion of business activity, which usually follows distance decay patterns from core to periphery. Regional development policies, pursued by regional authorities, directed at...

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the issue of income convergence has received considerable attention in economic research. Although a vast number of empirical studies has emerged, evidence on the role of spatial interaction is still rather scarce. The present paper is an attempt to provide...

The authors quantify the fungibility effect or diversion of resources towards purposes other than investment, by regions receiving conditional capital transfers. To identify this behaviour, they have taken different empirical approaches with frontier techniques that let them quantify whether the...

There is a broad theoretical consensus on the effects of transfers (desired incentive impacts and induced adverse effects). But, as the literature review shows, there is not an accepted methodology for the empirical evaluation of these effects. The authors suggest a simple but rigorous empirical...

Recently, there has been a growing interest in newly developed econometric tools to conduct counterfactual analysis when a treated unit experiences a policy intervention, and an artificial control group has to be constructed. Adopting novel penalized synthetic control methods, we quantify the...

Climate action requires significant public- and private sector investment to achieve meaningful reductions in carbon emissions. This paper documents that large-scale austerity, coupled with barriers to flows of data and a lack of (digital) skills in (local) government, may have been a...

Climate action requires significant public- and private sector investment to achieve meaningful reductions in carbon emissions. This paper documents that large-scale austerity, coupled with barriers to flows of data and a lack of (digital) skills in (local) government, may have been a...

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....

We analyse the effect of public Research and Development (R&D) subsidies on private sector innovativeness for a cross-section of East German firms applying different matching estimations, which are primary based on an estimate of a propensity score. To do so, we use a until now unexplored...

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the innovation promotion programs carried by the National Research and Innovation Agency (ANII). A combination of non-experimental methods was used to quantify the effects of public support to innovation in three dimensions of the firms'...