The impact of place-based policies on income distribution

Giuseppe Albanese, Guglielmo Barone () and Guido DeBlasio ()
Additional contact information
Guido DeBlasio: Banca d'Italia
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Guido de Blasio

No 2021-04, Discussion Paper series in Regional Science & Economic Geography from Gran Sasso Science Institute, Social Sciences

Abstract: This paper assesses the causal impact of a prominent place-based policy - the EU cohesion policy - on income distribution in the receiving areas by studying a severe contraction of financing, which took place in the Italian region of Molise starting from 2008. We focus on the Gini Index at the municipality level and leverage a spatial difference-in-discontinuity empirical design. We show that local income distribution becomes more equal in the municipalities exposed to the shrinkage of EU funds, relative to untreated units located on the other side of the geographical border that identifies the generosity of aid regimes. The decrease in the Gini coefficient is due to the move of top earners to the center of the distribution. The reduction in the Gini index is confirmed even if we resort to a region-level analysis, in which the causal effect of the end of the policy is assessed by means of the synthetic control method.

Keywords: place-based policy; income distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2021-03, Revised 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.gssi.it/images/DPRSEG_2021-04.pdf First version, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ahy:wpaper:wp15

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper series in Regional Science & Economic Geography from Gran Sasso Science Institute, Social Sciences Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Ascani ().