ZEW Discussion Papers

This report addresses the legal aspects of how the EU’s Cohesion Policy has changed over the past decade, exploring the legal argumentation behind its transformation. Cohesion Policy used to be understood as a…

This chapter discusses factors that contributed to different economic dynamics across European regions and the prevailing disparities. The impact of EU Cohesion Policy in reducing disparities is studied based on…

With the aim of contributing to the ongoing discussions on the future of post-2027 Cohesion Policy (CP), this chapter delves into the functioning of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). It examines the…

This chapter examines the distributional effects of place-based policies in the EU. In a first step, it characterizes existing income inequalities in the EU and distinguishes between their interregional and…

In its current setup, the European Union is often characterised as slow, decision-impeding, inefficient and therefore not really ready for enlargement. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis and the…

Independent and high-quality evaluations of government policies are an important input for designing evidence-based policy. Lack of incentives and institutions to write such evaluations, on the other hand, carry…

In a randomized experiment embedded in a survey, I test the effects of variations in question wording and format on consumer response behavior and the corresponding inflation expectations. To this end, survey…

We study how connections to German federal parliamentarians affect firm dynamics by constructing a novel dataset to measure connections between politicians and the universe of firms. To identify the causal…

By international comparison as well as compared to other EU policies, the EU‘s Cohesion Policy (CP) evaluation system is far developed and institutionalized. This paper analyses the remaining gaps and…