Documents Mohl, Philipp 5 results

"Despite its rather broad goal of promoting “economic, social and territorial cohesion”, the existing literature has mainly focused on investigating the Cohesion Policy's growth effects. This ignores the fact that part of the EU expenditures is directly aimed at reducing disparities in the employment sector. Against this background, the paper analyses the impact of EU structural funds on employment drawing on a panel dataset of 130 European NUTS regions over the time period 1999-2007. Compared to previous studies we (i) explicitly take into account the unambiguous theoretical propositions by testing the conditional impact of structural funds on the educational attainment of the regional labour supply, (ii) use more precise measures of structural funds for an extended time horizon and (iii) examine the robustness of our results by comparing different dynamic panel econometric approaches to control for heteroscedasticity, serial and spatial correlation as well as for endogeneity. Our results indicate that high-skilled population in particular benefits from EU structural funds."

"More than one third of the total EU budget is spent on so-called Cohesion Policy via the structural funds. Its main purpose is to reduce disparities among EU regions and to promote economic growth and convergence. Therefore, the convergence process of EU regions is a question of high political importance. The overall empirical evidence points to a small convergence effect of all or at least some European regions. However, whether or not this potential success results from EU Cohesion Policy remains an open question. The existing empirical evidence has provided mixed, if not contradictory, results. While some authors do find evidence of a positive impact of structural funds on economic growth, others find little to no impact at all. Against this background, this paper provides a fundamental review of the econometric evaluation of EU Cohesion Policy in order to shed light on the reasons for the diverging results. It has been shown that the econometric evaluation of EU Cohesion Policy is hampered by several econometric issues. Based on these issues we discuss potential solutions on how to cope with these problems and discuss the related literature.The most that can be concluded from empirical studies using country-level data is that Cohesion Policy seems to be only conditionally effective. Given a good quality institutional setup or decentralised governmental structures, Cohesion Policy has a positive impact on growth. However, using regional level data might be the preferable alternative because, first, EU Cohesion Policy focuses on the development and convergence of regions and, second, the robustness of the results is increased by the higher number of cross sections. The majority of the studies based on EU regions find at least a weak positive effect. One explanation for the weak results might be the fact that almost all studies are derived from a neoclassical growth model assuming that EU Cohesion Policy increases investments, and ultimately raising the economic growth rate. However, there is some empirical evidence that Cohesion Policy may only have a modest impact on investments. Moreover, we know very little about the labour market impact of EU Cohesion Policy. Hence, one task for future studies will be to investigate more thoroughly the channels through which EU Cohesion Policy works. Another reason for the inconclusive empirical results might be that the allocation of funds is at least partly determined by political-economic factors.In this context, the allocation of Cohesion Policy is not solely based on clear-cut criteria, rather there is room for political bargaining and/or side payments. This might result in the funding of politically feasible, and less economically efficient, projects."

"The current empirical literature on the impact of EU Cohesion Policy on the economic growth rates of the European regions mainly relies on functional form assumptions. However, it is ex ante not clear which functional form is appropriate with regard to the relationship between structural funds payments and regional economic growth. In order to avoid such assumptions, this paper applies the method of generalized propensity score (GPS) to a sample of 122 NUTS-1 and NUTS-2 EU-15 regions for the time period 1995-2005, which leads to the estimation of a dose-response function, as proposed by Hirano and Imbens (2004). Our results indicate that structural funds payments have a positive, but not statistically significant, impact on the regions' average three-year growth rates. This implies that it does not matter which "dose" of structural funds payments a region receives. "

"This paper analyses the growth effects of EU structural funds using a new panel dataset of 124 NUTS-1 / NUTS-2 regions over the time period 1995-2005. We extend the current literature with regard to at least three aspects: First of all, we extend the time period of investigation, using structural funds payments of the last Financial Perspective 2000-2006 that have not been analysed before. Second, we use more precise measures of structural funds by distinguishing between Objective 1, 2 and 3 payments and by investigating the impact of time lags more carefully. Third, we examine the robustness of our results by comparing different econometric approaches highlighting specific methodological problems. Apart from "classical" panel data methods like system GMM, we apply spatial panel econometric techniques. The empirical evidence indicates that the Objective 1 payments in particular have a positive and significant impact on growth, whereas Objective 2 and 3 payments negatively affect the regions' growth rates. Furthermore, our results show that the growth impact occurs with a time lag of approximately two to three years."

"The growing inequality of market income has, in the recent past, attracted considerable attention; less so the redistribution of income. This paper analyses key trends and drivers determining the size of income redistribution across households. We show that in the EU increasing redistribution has largely stabilised the distribution of disposable income since the late 1990s. Only developing countries, where lagging income levels do not allow larger welfare programmes, and some advanced countries with a dominant free market ideology have recorded an increasing inequality of disposable income alongside a growing inequality of market outcomes. Our evidence from panel data shows that the degree of redistribution increases with percapita income, the share of low-tech, low-income sectors in manufacturing and, in line with the median voter model, when more than half of the voters earn less than the average income in countries with a majoritarian electoral system."