Benoit Dicharry

Ongoing works

"Regional decentralisation and the European Cohesion Policy: The leader takes it all"

How does regional decentralisation affect the allocation of the EU funds at the national level? This paper formalises and shows that regional autonomy intensifies the political economy of the European Cohesion Policy (ECP) based on a signalling game between a central government and its constituent lagging region. The central government is less willing to provide European transfers to more autonomous lagging regions. This theoretical prediction is empirically confirmed by a study based on a 119 NUTS-2 regions belonging to 18 Member states dataset over the period 1989-2018. However, this study does not find any evidence of significant relation between absorption performance and the final regional allocation.

"Positive Externalities of the EU Cohesion Policy: Toward More Synchronized CEE Economies?", with Lubica Stiblarova (Technical University of Kosice, Faculty of Economics, Slovak Republic).

Using over 3,000 bilateral country-pairs during three programming periods, we assess the impact of the European Cohesion Policy (ECP) on business cycle synchronization, which is one of the prerequisites for a common monetary policy in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Panel instrumental variables estimation results suggest that the ECP provides a positive externality in terms of increased synchronicity between the EU countries. The effects are even stronger when taking into account the EMU membership, which would suggest the less synchronized non-euro Central and Eastern European member states to become a part of the EMU. Further analysis reveals that the systematically identified driving forces are the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Cohesion Fund (CF).