Do EU structural funds promote regional employment? Evidence from dynamic panel data models

Philipp Mohl and Tobias Hagen

No 1403, Working Paper Series from European Central Bank

Abstract: 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. JEL Classification: R11, R12, C23, J20

Keywords: dynamic panel models; EU structural funds; regional employment effects; spatial panel econometrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-eur, nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecb:ecbwps:20111403

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