Cohesion Policy Meets Heterogeneous Firms

Loredana Fattorini, Mahdi Ghodsi and Armando Rungi

No 142, wiiw Working Papers from The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, wiiw

Abstract: In this paper, we empirically test the effects of the EU’s ‘cohesion policy’ on the performance of 273,500 European manufacturing firms after combining regional policy data at NUTS 2 level with firm-level data. In a framework of heterogeneous firms and different absorptive capacity of regions, we show that the financing of ‘cohesion policy’ by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) aimed at direct investments in R&D correlates with an improvement of firms’ productivity in a region. Conversely, funding aimed at overall Business Support correlates with negative productivity growth rates. In both cases, we registered an asymmetric impact along the firms’ productivity distribution, where a stronger impact can be detected in the first quartile, i.e. less efficient firms in a region. We finally argue that considering the heterogeneity of firms allows a better assessment of the impact of ‘cohesion policy’ measures.

Keywords: firm performance; total factor productivity; cross-country analysis; convergence; regional policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 D24 E23 F15 L25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages including 8 Tables and 4 Figures
Date: 2018-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff, nep-eur and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Cohesion Policy Meets Heterogeneous Firms (2020)
Working Paper: Cohesion Policy Meets Heterogeneous Firms (2018)
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