Sébastien Bourdin (p), Thomas Cornier

Elena Ragazzi

In a context of increased competition between cities, they must offer jobs and a quality of life that can meet the expectations of increasingly demanding residents (Roy-Valex, 2006). In fact, territories must continuously stimulate their competitiveness and attractiveness to survive (Camagni, 2005). They view the territories in terms of rivalry and must strengthen their competitive advantages to attract capital. Among these competitive advantages, the question of quality of life in the city has its place and is an increasingly recurring argument. Bourdeau-Lepage (2015) thus defends the idea that it is essential to consider the attractiveness of territories through the quality of life and amenities they offer.
The European Union is increasingly focusing on quality of life. The emergence of a Europe-wide urban policy has given new impetus to the need to monitor the development and implementation of this policy, in particular through comparable indicators on quality of life. It is within this framework that the European Commission has led the project to set up an Urban Audit whose objective was to assess residents' perceptions of the quality of life in the city. This survey covers several areas such as employment, environment, housing, transport, culture and urban services. The variables chosen are in part in line with Sen's (1993) work that states that a territory must be able to offer both a "capacity to be" (the freedom to live easily, to maintain good health, to enjoy security and a pleasant living environment) and an "ability to act" (the freedom to travel, to access education, the labour market and various leisure activities).
Many scientific studies have addressed this issue of quality of life within a city or at the scale of a country, but there is no comparative study literature at the scale of EU cities based on the data from the Urban Audit. The objective of this article is therefore to provide a framework for analysing the perception of the quality of life in cities at European level. We wish to question the existence of a spatial differentiation of the quality of life perceived by the inhabitants. In order to answer these questions, first we will use a Logit model to identify the main determinants of quality of life in cities, then we will carry out a typological analysis of European cities based on the data from the Urban Audit survey for 2006, 2012 and 2016.

Kristina Matuzeviciute (p), Mindaugas Butkus, Alma Maciulyte-Sniukiene, Diana Cibulskiene

Elena Ragazzi

Assessing the return on the EU’s regional financial support, the research examines whether financial support promotes economic growth, increases labour productivity, and creates new jobs. Since 2000, these issues have been widely discussed in scientific studies aiming to ascertain if the cost of regional policy is justified, and whether the return on Structural Funds (SF) investments is positive. However, scientific studies rarely discuss the effect of financial support in the light of the regional disparities despite the fact that cohesion is the ultimate goal of the EU’s regional policy, and mainly test the proposed evaluation models at NUTS 2 or at country level. Moreover, previous contributions in this field show the importance of factors that foster or hinder, i.e. condition the effect of financial support, thus raising the question of heterogeneous effects across regions. In the light of these facts, this article aims to discuss a model that would supplement a new strand of literature based on quasi-experimental approach and be able to assess the return on the EU’s regional financial support capturing heterogeneous financial support effects on regional disparities. Empirical application is based on NUTS 3 level data over 2000-2006 programming period and estimation of the effects on the dynamics of per capita GDP disparities between SF beneficiaries and control group. Estimations provide an evidence that EU’s regional financial support diminishes disparities between financial beneficiaries and unsupported regions and that significance and size of the positive effect are highly conditioned on quality of institutions in the region.

Marco Di Cataldo (p), Riccardo Crescenzi , Mara Giua

Elena Ragazzi

Investment Promotion Agencies (IPAs) represent an increasingly common policy tool not only for countries but also for regions to attract foreign investment. While some literature exists on national IPAs, there is no research on the effectiveness of their regional counterparts. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the regional impacts of both national and regional IPAs in Europe, analysing how the diverse institutional configurations and strategies relate to investment attraction. The paper leverages an ad-hoc survey on the structure and strategy of national and regional IPAs, developing a differences-in-differences model to estimate their effectiveness in attracting foreign investments to the host regions. This analysis is complemented by counterfactual evidence obtained with the synthetic control method. The findings suggest that regional IPAs have a positive impact on the inflow of FDI (in terms of both dollar values and jobs created) towards targeted sectors. The evidence on the impact of national agencies on European regions is more mixed. We exploit the heterogeneity in the configuration of IPA structures within countries to investigate the most effective models for investment attraction.

Mathieu Sanch-Maritan, Lionel Vedrine (p)

Elena Ragazzi

This article explores the role of city size on unemployment volatility. We present
a simple new economic geography model of labor pooling to illustrate how the relation
between economic shocks and local unemployment can be mitigated by city size. Then,
we exploit a quasi-natural experiment by studying the economic impact of 357 local
shocks both negative and positive generated by the reform and the restructuring of the
French army. Exploiting a geo-referenced dataset of unemployment spell over an extensive
period of time (2005-2014), we are able to measure the impact of these local shock on the rate at which unemployed workers and a job. To construct a credible counterfactual
for each zone which experienced a closure, we use an interactive fixed effects model.
We show that contractions in military personnel reduce the local likelihood of finding a
job. Moreover, our results reveal some heterogeneity in the local economy's resilience.
In line with our theoretical model, we show that city size is a relevant explanation for
the observed heterogeneity in resilience: the likelihood of finding a job is less affected in
denser area by a relative equal-sized shift in labor demand.