This research attempts to fill the gap in the literature regarding voting behavior in the Justice and Home Affairs configuration of the Council of the European Union. The results from fixed effect...Show moreThis research attempts to fill the gap in the literature regarding voting behavior in the Justice and Home Affairs configuration of the Council of the European Union. The results from fixed effect logistic regressions of various models are that the state of the national budget was the most important factor in explaining voting behavior in this configuration. While there are a multitude of research limitations that limit the generability of these results, it does provide a solid starting point for further research.Show less
Happiness under extreme economic adversity is rare. This thesis investigates if EU redistributive policies, like the European Regional Investment Fund (ERDF), have improved self-reported happiness...Show moreHappiness under extreme economic adversity is rare. This thesis investigates if EU redistributive policies, like the European Regional Investment Fund (ERDF), have improved self-reported happiness outcomes. I focus on “less developed” regions receiving funding, defined by the European Commission as those regions which fall under a GDP per capita of <75% of the EU-wide average. Using happiness research and the capability approach as a lens, I hypothesize that the increased development caused by the ERDF would also result in better happiness outcomes for individuals living in less developed regions versus when this funding would be absent. I make use of a fuzzy RD approach to evaluate this hypothesis and found inconsistent results. The statistically significant results I found point towards a statistically significant positive treatment effect, with the caveat that these findings are hugely depended on model specification and show large standard errors. Given these findings, I concluded that while the capability approach provides useful pointers, further research must be done to be able to definitively conclude that ERDF funds positively influence happiness.Show less
The European Union promotes quality of life and happiness among all EU-citizens. This aim is partly pursued through EU-funding for different countries. At the same time, there are rising levels of...Show moreThe European Union promotes quality of life and happiness among all EU-citizens. This aim is partly pursued through EU-funding for different countries. At the same time, there are rising levels of discontent among many EU-countries which raises doubts if the EU actually increases happiness. This paper focuses on the aspect of EU-funding and studies the effect of EU-funding on happiness through the research question: ‘What is the effect of EU-funding towards a country on happiness among EU-citizens?’. This paper is using panel data regressions with fixed effects from 2014 to 2020 over 27 different countries to find results. The results of this paper suggest that there is no general effect of EU-funding on happiness among all EU-countries as insufficient proof of an association is found. This paper does find an interesting result when testing EU-countries which joined the European Union before and from 2004 separately. Different parts of EU-funding have different effects on different EU-countries. For example, some parts of EU-funding have a positive association with countries which joined the European Union from 2004 and a negative association with countries which joined the European Union before 2004. This means that the differences between EU-countries change how their happiness is influenced by different drivers.Show less
This thesis studies the influence of the nationality of the President of the European Commission on the share of the total EU budget that the President’s country of origin receives. I focus on the...Show moreThis thesis studies the influence of the nationality of the President of the European Commission on the share of the total EU budget that the President’s country of origin receives. I focus on the President of the European Commission because he or she arguably has more power and influence on the allocation of the EU budget than any other Commissioner. I analyse the period 1977-2018. The results from the entire sample show no significant effect. However, when looking at the EU era (1992-2018), there is a significant positive effect. For this period, supplying the EC President causes a 0.814 percentage point increase in the overall EU budget share that a country receives. This translates to an increase of 850 million euros per year. The results were obtained from a regression which includes certain control variables as well as year and country fixed effects.Show less
