Over the 2014-2020 financial period, 451 billion € of ESIF are invested in Cohesion policies, of which more than 40 billion € are dedicated directly to the thematic objective related to research and innovation. Among ESIF funds, ERDF is the main source of funding of Innovation through the implementation of smart specialisation strategies with a management shared between the Commission and the regional or national authorities. In this respect the monitoring and the evaluation of ESIF are implemented at regional or national level. At European Commission level, monitoring of cohesion policy is carried out mainly at operational programme (OP) level, meaning only very limited information is available at project and beneficiaries' level, also with partly low accuracy in terms of geographical information (OP can be national or in some cases multiregional). Reporting at project and beneficiary level is carried out through national or regional databases gathering information on beneficiaries (type of organisation, localisation, etc.) and details on funded projects (e.g., titles and abstracts and possibly other additional info depending the territory). Conversely to Horizon 2020 and due to the shared management, a complete structured database of ESIF projects does not exist. While information on ESIF beneficiaries and projects is recorded, this is held by individual regional or national managing authorities. Gathering this information on projects and beneficiaries in a single structured database would greatly benefit policy monitoring and evaluation, and the identification and creation of synergies with Horizon 2020 funding. This database would also feed ex-ante impact assessment analysis for the future multi-annual financial period (2021-2027), for the future cohesion policies and Horizon-Europe programme. The design of a structured and comprehensive database of projects funded by ERDF for the period 2014-2018 is based on the systematic collection of all information available at national and regional levels. The whole content of the database is translated to English (including project titles and abstracts) using European Commission Machine translation tool. The database offers also additional information such as keywords associated to each project in order to be able to bridge easily information contained in the ERDF projects database with, among others, Eye@RIS3 and the Horizon 2020 database. This report explains the origins of the information, the processing of collected information and the proxies used to obtain the most complete and comprehensive picture as possible of what has been supported through ERDF funding since 2014.

We study whether the positive effects of homeownership on political participation and social capital, found in developed market economies, extend to post-communist countries. We use the privatisation of publicly owned housing in post-communist countries as an exogenous source of variation of homeownership status to identify its impact on political participation and social capital formation. We find that homeownership is strongly related to higher participation in local-level and national elections. In post-communist countries, homeownership is also related to higher social trust. However, the positive association between homeownership and volunteering found in developed market economies does not extend to postcommunist countries. Together, our results corroborate that homeownership is associated with positive social benefits. However, these effects are highly heterogeneous and context-dependent.