Valeria Nemethova (p), Miroslav Sipikal

Anet Weterings

The promotion of innovation in SMEs is an important element of economic growth and also it is an objective of the European Union's economic and regional policy. Therefore, it is essential to evaluate the effectiveness of this support. The main goal of the presented research is to evaluate the support in selected companies in Slovakia through counterfactual impact evaluation method. The evaluated projects were financed from the European Union Structural Funds under priority axis 11 Strengthening the competitiveness and growth of SMEs, Operational Program Integrated Infrastructure. There was a total of 634 supported projects in 17 sections implemented in years from 2016 to 2021. We examine the projects of applied companies and try to determine the impact of support through selected financial indicators of companies which were compared before the implementation of support and in the period after implementation, while we evaluated the impact through an analysis of supported and unsupported companies.

Anna-Theresa Renner (p), Simone Ghislandi, Benedetta Scotti, Nirosha Varghese

Valeria Nemethova

In the European Union, cost containment strategies following the financial crisis in 2008 have been particularly targeted towards reorganization of the inpatient sector given that hospitals account for large shares of healthcare budgets. Despite the increasing numbers of hospital closures and mergers, few empirical studies have provided credible evidence on the consequences for patient health. This paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to study the causal effect of hospital closures on AMI patient outcomes including in-hospital mortality, readmission and length of stay. In particular, the outcomes of all AMI patients in Italy admitted from 2008-2015 that were exposed to a hospital closure are compared with those that were not. We further check two potential mechanisms for the identified effects: increased travel time and hospital bed congestion. Results show that hospital closures increase in-hospital mortality by 1.2% and length of stay by about 0.4 days. There is no statistically significant effect on readmissions, although, home hospital closures increase 30-day and 90-day readmission when considering only small municipalities with a population size less than 50k. The effect of hospital closure on in-hospital mortality and readmission is persistent across the post-closure years indicating that there is no short- to medium-term adaptation. Further, using 2-stage-least-squares modelling we show that hospital congestion is more relevant than travel time in explaining the causal mechanism of hospital closures on AMI outcomes in Italy.

Jeroen Bastiaanssen, Anet Waterings (p), Trond Husby

Anna-Theresa Renner

This study examines the impact of the newly constructed Hanzelijn railway in 2012 in the Netherlands on individual-level employment outcomes. The opening of a railway station in the town of Dronten, which substantially decreased public transport commuting times to regional employment centres, represents an exogenous change in job accessibility. We combine a difference-in-difference approach with a matching strategy to estimate the extent to which employment outcomes of people in Dronten have changed through time and in comparison with a control group, using Dutch administrative monthly panel data spanning the period 2006 to 2018. Our empirical results indicate that the opening of the railway station had virtually no statistically significant effect on employment probabilities of the inhabitants of Dronten who were in the working age at the moment the station was put into service, while we did find a significant increase in the number of days per year that they had work during the entire post-treatment period for the whole population, with larger effects and over a longer period for men, young people, those without access to household vehicles, and among workers with flexible job contracts. In terms of educational level, we only found statistically significant estimates for higher educated, who are more likely to use train services within the Dutch context. We also found a small significant increase in hourly wages, with larger effects among young people, middle- and lower educated, and among those with flexible job contracts, which may relate to job matching effects. The findings in this study are important for policymakers in that they imply that the reduction in public transport commuting times following from railway expansions, do not necessarily translate into a substantial improvement of the labour market outcomes of those living near the new station, in particular in more car-oriented rural environments