CC-ME’s research is as horizontal as the range of policy areas it aims to support in Commission services, with a focus on economic, environmental and social issues.
One area of interest is the broad field of research on social impacts - with a focus in public economics, labour, education and health economics. In this context, the research activities aim at understanding impacts both for firms and individuals.
A different and complementary angle is given by regional analysis, looking at development, disparities and aid, with the goal of identifying “what works” in attaining the policy objectives, such as reducing inequality.
From a methodological perspective, CC-ME also devotes efforts to study methodological problems to infer causal links in an increasingly efficient way; this hopefully can lead to a better exploitation of existing data. Often the focus is in the fields of theoretical and applied microeconometrics. In particular, counterfactual impact evaluation methods are often (even if not always) the preferred tools to disentangle causality of impacts.
The recent COVID-19 pandemic brought additional evaluation challenges, both in terms of interventions in need of evaluation and in terms of relevant data. In 2020 and also in 2021, CC-ME responded to these challenges with research activities dedicated to COVID-19 (COVID-19 studies).
Table 3 summarizes CC-ME’s research output in 2021. A list of papers and working papers published in 2021 with contributions by CC-ME members is included in the subsections below, following the previous classification. Within each section publications are sorted in alphabetical order; links to DOI are provided in the electronic version of this file when available.