Renato Garcia (p), Veneziano Araujo, Suelene Mascarini, Emerson Gomes dos Santos, Ariana Costa

Matías Mayor

See extended abstract

Eleonora Cutrini (p), Andrea Ciffolilli, Marco Pompili

Renato Garcia

This paper analyses the relation between the European expenditure for entrepreneurship in 2007-2013 and new firm formation in the Italian provinces (NUTS3 level). While there is a huge interest on the territorial effects of European structural funds, the empirical evidence so far is not conclusive and results provided have been possibly flawed by a series of limitations (See Aiello and Pupo (2012) for a critical review of the different approaches). In this respect, this work attempts overcoming some of the shortcomings highlighted by the related literature. First, our database allows us considering European funds actually spent and not just the resources committed. Second, high disaggregation of priorities gives us the possibility to focus on the resources dedicated to a specific purpose, i.e. the support to firm creation. Third, we perform our analysis at the higher territorial disaggregation then it has been usually done in the related literature, avoiding scale aggregation bias that may have affected previous unconvincing results. Forth, we rely on a set of econometric tools to correct for potential spatial autocorrelation. Binomial regression models are used to estimate the effects of public spending as well as of a set of control variables drawn from the literature on new firm formation. Our results show that the European Regional Development Fund has the positive, desired effect on entrepreneurship. As for the control variables, our analysis confirms previous findings of the literature in that we find a clear evidence for the role of human capital, demand growth and the density of economic activity. Our results are confirmed once we adopt spatial autoregressive models as robustness checks. We also control whether the impact of Cohesion policy is different over the North-South divide and we found that Cohesion policy is somehow more effective in lagged regions.

Matías Mayor (p), Patricia Suárez, Begoña Cueto

Eleonora Cutrini

According to the OECD, strengthening economic resilience is a key policy priority in order to reduce the vulnerability of economies to crises at the same time that reinforce their capacity to absorb and overcome severe shocks while supporting strong growth. Martin and Sunley (2015) have defined regional economic resilience as “the capacity of a regional or local economy to withstand or recover from market, competitive and environmental shocks to its developmental growth path”.
The analysis will allow us to explain the contribution of self-employment to resilience.
Regarding to the self-employment resilience in the Spanish province, we use the information from the Social Security database and these are the results in terms of resistance and recovery.
Shift-share analysis allow us to decompose the change in the number of self-employment workers in three effects: national, sectoral and competitive effect.
We compute the relative contribution of the sectoral and competitive effects during the last recession and recovery periods in comparison with the hypothetical regional growth (the contrafactual).