"FIW Award" for Julia Bachtrögler

Julia Bachtrögler's cumulative dissertation, which was written between the end of 2014 and mid-2018 and supervised by WU professors and WIFO consultants Harald Badinger and Jesús Crespo Cuaresma, comprises three articles, one of which has already been published in the renowned academic journal Regional Studies.

The main conclusion of the first paper is that the impact of structural funds allocation on GDP per capita growth in less developed regions in the programming period 2007-2013, which coincides with the economic and financial crisis, has decreased significantly compared to previous multi-annual financial frameworks since 1989-1993. The decline in effectiveness was much smaller in the ten Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 than in the EU-15, which may partly be related to a relatively higher learning effect in terms of effective funds usage.

The second paper uses a newly created dataset with more than one million beneficiaries of EU cohesion policy in the multi-annual financial framework 2007-2013 to estimate the impact of the funds on employment, value added and productivity growth of supported firms in the manufacturing industry. The effects vary between countries and regions with different territorial capital.

The empirical analysis in the third paper uses the French presidential election as a case study and suggests that higher employment effects (in subsidised firms) caused by regional funds are associated with fewer votes for the Eurosceptic candidate Marine Le Pen.

Julia Bachtrögler has been a research associate at WIFO in the research area of Structural Change and Regional Development since May 2018. Prior to this, she spent four years researching and teaching as a research assistant and PhD student at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. During her PhD studies, she worked on the evaluation of EU cohesion policy, focusing on the impact of the economic and financial crisis on its effectiveness as well as on the estimation of its effects on individual beneficiaries' performance. To this end, she was in charge of the creation of a database linking the data on recipients of EU regional funds in 25 EU member states and their respective projects with firm-level data. In addition, she gained further experience in the analysis of EU cohesion policy in two OECD projects.
 

Bachtrögler, J., Fratesi, U., Perucca, G., The influence of the local context on the implementation and impact of EU Cohesion Policy, Regional Studies, 2019, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00343404.2018.1551615

Bachtrögler, J., Hammer, C., Reuter, W. H., Schwendinger, F., Guide to the galaxy of EU regional funds recipients: evidence from new data. Empirica, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10663-018-9427-5.