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Our empirical analysis focuses on the effect of regional policies on migration attraction factors in Europe. We employ a regression discontinuity design to assess the causal relationship between the reception of large amounts of public funds and migration flows in the EU‐15 regions. In highly‐subsidised regions, we find a large increase in the share of foreign citizens from less‐developed countries when compared to low‐subsidised regions with similar pre‐treatment characteristics. The analysis shows that such an increase is due to the positive impact of the European regional policy on job market opportunities as well as the improvement of public goods supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses microeconomic data for more than 100,000 European individuals in order to analyse whether the individual economic returns to education vary between migrants and non-migrants and whether any differences in earnings between these two groups are affected by household and/or geographical (regional and interregional) externalities. The results point out that while education is a fundamental determinant of earnings, European labour markets do not discriminate in the returns to education between migrants and non-migrants. Household, regional and supra-regional externalities influence the economic returns to education in a similar way for local, intranational and supra-national migrants. The results are robust to the introduction of a large number of individual, household and regional controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]