Convergence in Political Preferences and the EU Single Market joint with Christiane Hellmanzik and Jens Wrona

Using voting outcomes from the European Parliament to measure the similarity of political preferences between individual member states and the rest of the European Union, we demonstrate that member states, which converge to the EU's political mainstream, benefit from an increase in bilateral trade with other EU member states. We argue that our political convergence measure is informative about the political uncertainty that shrouds each member state's future commitment to the EU's single market, and that a reduced political uncertainty - signaled through an observable political convergence - is conducive to an increase in intra-EU trade.

Connecting Europe: The Impact of the Trans-European Road Network joint with Christiane Hellmanzik and Jens Wrona

Do cohesion policies and infrastructure investments increase regional trade integration in the EU? Using the EU's commodity flow survey (ERFT) for the years 2011-2019 and infrastructure investments as part of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T), we find an inter-regional trade enhancing effect on NUTS-2 inter-regional trade flows. To ensure that this result is not driven by endogenous timing or location of these projects, we consider the effect of road construction at NUTS-2 pair level and focus on NUTS-2 pairs which are incidentally affected by road construction outside the region of origin or destination. This study thereby provides novel empirical evidence of a trade enhancing effect across intra-national as well as international borders for mainland EU NUTS-2 regions.

Social connectedness, FDI and Trade joint with Felix Dornseifer and Vanessa Hellwig