Towards the Greater Good? EU Commissioners' Nationality and Budget Allocation in the European Union

Kai Gehring and Stephan Schneider

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2018, vol. 10, issue 1, 214-39

Abstract: We demonstrate that the nationalities of EU Commissioners influence budget allocation decisions in favor of their country of origin. Our focus is on the Commissioners for Agriculture, who are exclusively responsible for a specific fund that accounts for the largest share of the overall EU budget. On average, providing the Commissioner causes a 1 percentage point increase in a country's share of the overall EU budget, which corresponds to 850 million euros per year. There are no different pretreatment trends and the magnitude of the bias from selection-on-unobservables would have to be implausibly high to account for the estimated coefficient.

JEL-codes: D72 F55 H61 H77 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
Note: DOI: 10.1257/pol.20160038
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

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Working Paper: Towards the Greater Good? EU Commissioners’ Nationality and Budget Allocation in the European Union (2015)
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