No abstract

The paper aims at investigating the impact of the Great Recession on per capita GDP convergence process across European regions and countries. Using the time-varying factor model developed by Phillips and Sul for the period 2000-2015 and two different merging procedures to identify clubs, we provide evidence of the diverging impact of the Great Recession "between" the higher and the lower convergence clubs at both regional and country levels as well as of the strengthening of the convergence process "within" most clubs. In addition, we add further evidence to the common belief of a "multi-speed" Europe by contrasting Eastern European countries' and regions' behavior visà-vis original European members' one, and by identifying the factors that affect club membership and resilience to the recent economic downturn. We find that the membership in the higher clubs and resilience to the Great Recession are positively affected by the presence of several local-specific factors and macroeconomic characteristics.

No abstract

This paper analyses the differential impact of several territorial determinants of the economic performance of Italian provinces (NUTS 3 level). as measured by per capita GDP, export and employment growth from 1999 to 2014. It covers both the pre‐crisis and the crisis period and stresses the role of geographical proximity in shaping local performance over a wide set of explanatory variables. In order to do so, we employ, firstly, a spatial Durbin model which enables us to discriminate between direct and indirect effects and to highlight the possible contagion or crowding‐out spatial effects for each territorial dimension affecting growth. Then, we extend the analysis by allowing for the possibility of two regimes (pre‐crisis and post‐crisis). The performance of the provinces before and during the crisis relates to specific territorial components and geographic proximity appears to influence differently the results and their interpretation.

Air transport is an essential component of the tourism industry, and the number, frequency, and capacity of flight connections may influence the level of tourism demand, especially for island destinations. This paper evaluates the influence of air transport on tourism arrivals to selected islands in seven southern European Union countries to determine the nature of the relationship between tourist arrivals and air transport, specifically, whether air transport services generate tourism demand or merely enable touristic flows. The paper uses panel data and applies an econometric model with justifications for endogeneity and dynamic issues. Results show a moderate impact of transport infrastructures on generating additional tourist arrivals; however, the model shows that air transport is a prerequisite to developing tourism demand and is not the only determinant in increasing tourist arrivals. Tourist arrivals appear more a determinant than a consequence of changes in-flight connections.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to verifying the economic resilience of islands and, in particular, the role of the tourism sector in the reaction to the most recent economic crisis. The analysis concerns insular contexts, such as the greater island regions in the Mediterranean basin. Design/methodology/approach Static and dynamic panel data techniques are used for a sample of 13 island economies over a period of 16 years. Findings Results show that the growth factors for regional islands are similar to the ones usually considered for other regions, but the tourism-led growth hypothesis is highly supported. Tourism demand more than supply plays a role together with accessibility. The crisis has reduced the importance of tourism supply, while tourism demand and accessibility have remained crucial for growth together with other traditional engines of growth. Originality/value To the best of authors’ knowledge, none of the current works has considered territorial determinants and tourism indicators inside the same framework analyzing growth in island economies by considering the changes occurred during the crisis explicitly.

This paper provides new empirical evidence of the asymmetric effects of monetary policy shocks across regions. Using a measure of unanticipated changes in the Fed's policy rates over the period 1969Q3–2008Q4 and a local projection method extended to account for spatial effects, we find that monetary policy tightening leads to a long‐lasting decrease in states' real personal income, with asymmetric effects across states that are amplified by spatial spillovers. The paper then investigates the role played by several transmission channels finding larger contractionary effects of monetary policy tightening in states with higher manufacturing share, smaller firms, smaller banks and higher house prices.

Appendix A Discussion of propensity score matching methodologies A.1 Propensity score and matching methods in a binary settingIn the first step of our empirical analysis we aim at estimating the treatment effect τ i for the unit (municipality) i, defined as the difference of the outcome measured between the binary cases of participation Y i (1) and non-participation Y i (0) to the policy.The standard problem of the missing counterfactual is partially solved through the estimation of the propensity score, defined as the probability, for the unit i, of receiving the treatment D i , given the pre-treatment characteristics X i (Rosenbaum and Rubin, 1983):The balancing and unconfoundedness properties of the propensity score (for a formal proof see among others Cerulli et al., 2015;Dehejia and Wahba, 2002) allow us to use the estimated propensity score to quantify the policy effect proxied by the average treatment effect on treated:Given that the propensity score (A2) is a continuous measure that can assume any value between zero and one, we need to define some rules in order to match treated and control units after the estimation of the propensity score itself. A range of different metrics have been definedin literature in order to match treated to control units and compute the ATET, and no method is, ex-ante, better than the others. Since all these methods should asymptotically give the same results, the literature (see among others Caliendo and Kopeinig, 2008