Luisa Gagliardi

The impact of European Cohesion Policy in urban and rural regions

ABSTRACT The impact of European Cohesion Policy in urban and rural regions. Regional Studies. This paper presents an evaluation exercise on the impact of European Cohesion Policy on the economic performance of the most disadvantaged European areas (Objective 1 regions) for the programming period 2000–06. By performing the analysis at NUTS-3 rather than NUTS-2 level to exploit the exogeneity of the treatment status in the context of a regression discontinuity design (RDD), the analysis shows that European Cohesion funds have positively contributed to generating economic growth in lagging areas. However, their effect is mainly driven by the successful performance of rural areas close to the main urban agglomerates. Favourable geography and the progressive suburbanization of the rural landscape created new opportunities for rural areas close to cities, thus boosting the effect of the policy.

The Bright Side of Social Capital: How 'Bridging' Makes Italian Provinces More Innovative

Social capital has remained relatively underexplored in innovation literature. Existing studies have failed to reach a consensus on its impact on local innovative performance: some empirical analyses emphasize a positive effect, others speak about a ‘dark side’ of social capital. This paper aims to fill this gap by shedding new light on the differential role of ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ social capital. The quantitative analysis of the innovative performance of the Italian provinces shows that social capital is an important predictor of innovative performance after controlling for ‘traditional’ knowledge inputs (R&D investments and human capital endowment) and other characteristics of the local economy. However, only ‘bridging’ social capital – based on weak ties – can be identified as the key driver of the process of innovation while ‘bonding’ social capital is shown to be negative for innovation. Instrumental variable analysis makes it possible to identify clear causal links between bridging (positive) and bonding (negative) social capital and innovation.

The Greener the Better: Job Creation and Environmentally‐Friendly Technological Change

This paper investigates the link between environment related innovation and job creation at firm level. Employing Italian data on 4,507 manufacturing firms, matched with patent records for the period 2001-2008, we test whether “green” innovation, measured using the number of environment related patents, has a positive effect on long run employment growth that is specific with respect to non environmental innovation. Results show a strong positive impact of “green” innovation on long run job creation, substantially bigger than the effect of other innovations. Our findings are robust to a number of additional tests including controls for cost differential between generic and “green” innovation and endogeneity.

Built to last: population aging and long run development in metropolitan Europe

The paper examines the role of demography on the growth perspectives of European metropolitan areas. Our findings are in support of the key role played by the demographic structure of the population in determining the economic prospects of European cities. Regions and cities with higher levels of dependency ratios are found to show lower growth rates, in the long run. This evidence supports earlier findings on the relevance of population age on both aggregate productivity changes and the human capital stock of the local labour force.