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.
Forschungsbereich:Regionalökonomie und räumliche Analyse