The impact of EU Eastern enlargement on urban growth and decline: New insights from Germany's Eastern border.

This paper uses the quasi‐experimental setting of the 2004 EU enlargement, as well as town‐level data along the affected German border, to estimate the effect of economic integration on border town population development. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach, we find that the accession has had a significant positive effect on the rate of population change after 2004. However, this does not offset the, generally, poorer population development of border towns compared to interior towns. Moreover, the integration effect appears to strongly depend on initial local conditions. No effects were found for Polish towns on the opposite side of the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]