Cohesion Policy Meets Heterogeneous Firms

In this paper, we empirically test the effects of the EU ‘cohesion policy’ on the performance of about 500,000 European manufacturing firms after combining regional policy data at NUTS- 2 level with firm-level data. In a framework of heterogeneous firms and different absorptive capacity of regions, we show that financing of ‘cohesion policy’ by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) aimed at direct investments in R&D correlates with improvement of firms’ productivity in a region. Conversely, funding designed at overall Business Support correlates with negative productivity growth rates. In both cases, we registered an asymmetric impact along the firms’ productivity distribution, where a stronger impact can be detected in the first quartile, i.e. less efficient firms in a region. We finally argue that considering the heterogeneity of firms allows a better assessment of the impact of ‘cohesion policy’ measures.