Boris A. Portnov (p)

Felipe Santos-Marquez

The association between artificial light at night (ALAN) and noise, on the one hand, and sleep in urban areas, on the other, is well established. Yet studies investigating these associations have been infrequent and mostly conducted in controlled laboratory conditions. As a result, little is known about the applicability of their results to real-world settings. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this knowledge gap by carrying out an individual-level real-world study, involving 72 volunteers from different urban localities in Israel. The survey participants were asked to use their personal smartphones and smartwatches to monitor sleep patterns for 30 consecutive days, while ALAN and noise exposures were monitored in parallel, with inputs reported each second. The volunteers were also asked to fill in a questionnaire about their individual attributes, daily habits, room settings, and personal health, to serve as individual-level controls. Upon co-integration, the assembled data were co-analyzed using bi-variate and multivariate statistical tools. As the study reveals, the effect of ALAN and noise on sleep largely depends on when the exposure occurred, that is, before sleep or during sleep. In particular, the effect of ALAN exposure was found to be most pronounced if it occurred before sleep, while exposure to noise mattered most if it occurred during the sleep phase. As the study also reveals, the effects of ALAN and noise appear to amplify each other, with a 14-15.3% reduction in sleep duration and an 8-9% reduction in sleep efficiency at high levels of ALAN-noise exposures. The study helped to assemble a massive amount of real-time observations, enabling a robust individual-level analysis.

Francesco Cappellano, Francesco Molica (p), Teemu Makkonen

Boris A. Portnov

The paper explores avenues for cross-fertilization between the Mission Oriented Approach (MOA) and Cohesion Policy (CP). It investigates whether the respective theoretical frameworks can learn one from the other to address specific shortcomings discussed by scholars. The first part of the paper focuses on those. CP, on the one hand, has been facing a gradual erosion of its identity as a result of its over-stretched remit, increasing use for counter-cyclical purposes, globalization forces, budgetary pressure, mixed evidence about its effects, shifting priorities at EU level. One prominent concern about MOA, on the other hand, is that its normative and top-down perspective can drive spatially-blind policies, ignoring local dynamism and areas of expertise, and ultimately accruing territorial imbalances. The paper argues that the MOA can offer a theoretical blueprint for re-organizing and streamlining CP priorities around few goals, linking more explicitly its objectives to major societal challenges so as to reinforce its rationale, and revive political ownership, using directionality to strengthen the result-orientation dimension, and blending top-down and bottom-up approaches to streamline the vertical and horizontal governance relations. In terms of MOA, the paper argues that it could benefit from CP in the following areas: 1) Thematic focus on objectives that can be adapted to territorial contexts and into regional policy agenda. 2) Goals of maximising equity and solidarity into its mission for tackling Societal Challenges (SCs). 3) Agenda to increase educational attainment (and overall empowerment) within EU regions. 4) Redistributive approach to foster the full potential of all EU regions to tackle SCs. The aim of the paper is to initiate and stir up further discussion on the possibility of mutual policy learning between CP and MOA. The purely theoretical nature of the paper calls for further empirical work to test whether its arguments hold when confronted with quantitative and qualitative data. At the end of the paper, it is argued that this line of research should be further pursued to inform the debate on the future EU Research Framework Programme and Cohesion Policy.

Felipe Santos-Marquez (p), Christian Lessmann

Francesco Molica

This paper analyses the effect of free trade agreements on the location of economic activity within countries. We exploit the variation of free trade agreements on the distribution of night light emissions at tri-border areas (also called tripoints, trijunctions, triple points), i.e., the exact locations where the borders of three countries touch. We run difference-in-difference estimations where we compare the bordering regions of two countries treated by a trade agreement versus the bordering region of the third country as control. These regions are defined as buffers from the tri-border points. Our results show that regional trade agreements increase economic activity in cities in those regions near the international land frontiers. We also report that the positive effects decay for distances further away from the border. Moreover, running event study estimations, we show that the impact of trade agreements is only robust for the cities within those regions and not for the regions overall, as measured by light intensities. Lastly, heterogeneity analyses show that cities in WTO member states have the only sizeable effects, that medium size cities experience a larger impact of TAs on growth, and that cities further away from the borderline experience relatively weaker effects.