Overview

The evaluation of public policies is of paramount importance for modern policy making, especially in a period of severe budget constraints. The literature has proposed several methods to deal with the issue of causality and counterfactual evaluation in a variety of contexts, with an increasing attention to the local dimension. The book aims to present the state-of-the-art of evaluation techniques with a special focus on the consideration of geographical and spatial effects into existing methodologies (such as propensity score matching, regression discontinuity, difference-in-difference). Furthermore, the volume highlights how strict the identification conditions for models with spatial effects are and proposes instrumental variables as a technique able to circumvent the issue. Finally, some insights into the emerging literature on ex ante evaluation are offered with respect to EU Cohesion Policy.