Empirica – Journal of European Economics

Sponsored by the Austrian Economic Association and the Austrian Institute of Economic Research

Empirica publishes empirical and theoretical work on all economic aspects of European Integration. The topics may range from all challenges concerning the deepening of the European Union (Single Market, Lisbon Agenda, EMU) to enlargement and the external relations of the EU (globalisation).

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Julia Bachtrögler, Christoph Hammer (WIFO), Wolf Heinrich Reuter, Florian Schwendinger
Guide to the galaxy of EU regional funds recipients: evidence from new data
Empirica, 2019, 46(1), pp.103-150, http://www.springer.com/10663
This study presents a new firm- and project-level dataset containing data on over two million projects co-funded by the EU structural and cohesion funds in 25 EU member countries during the programming period 2007-2013. Information on individual beneficiary firms and institutions is linked with business data of Bureau van Dijk's ORBIS database. Moreover, text mining techniques are applied to categorise the EU cohesion policy projects into fifteen thematic categories. Stylised facts reveal substantial regional heterogeneity in the distribution of funds to certain projects and beneficiaries (with respect to their size or industry). Furthermore, regional funds distribution differs across less developed and higher-income as well as urban and rural regions. In an econometric analysis, we control for project and firm characteristics that we expect to determine the single project's value, which is confirmed by the results. Nevertheless, there remains unexplained variation in individual project volumes, which differs systematically across countries.
Research group:Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis
Language:English

Managing Editor

Univ.-Prof. MMag. Dr. Harald Oberhofer

Function: Senior Economist, Editor-in-Chief Empirica
Research groups: Industrial, Innovation and International Economics