Convener: Professor Dariusz Wójcik

We take advantage of a unique form and scale of the administrative reform implemented in Poland on January 1st 1999 to study the role of administrative boundaries and administrative capital status on regional economic development. The reform reduced the number of the top tier administrative districts (voivodeships) from 49 to 16 and created a large central region, the Mazovian voivodeship, with Warsaw – the country’s capital as its centre. In the first part of the analysis we focus on peripheral municipalities of this voivodeship and compare their economic performance in relation to neighbouring municipalities on the outside of the Mazovian administrative border between 1995 and 2012. In the second part we examine the economic performance of cities which maintained the administrative capital status after the reform compared to those who lost it, and analyse the development of municipalities which – in consequence of the reform – found themselves further to regional administrative centres. We use a range of regional indicators for economic development including employment, indicators of local government finances, size of local physical infrastructure and a proxy for overall development in the form of satellite images of nighttime lights. We apply a number of difference-in-differences approaches to identify differences in the pace of development in municipalities differentially affected by the reform.

Michał Myck is Director of the Centre for Economic Analysis in Szczecin (PL). He previously worked at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (1999-2004) and at the DIW-Berlin (2005-2013). In years 2005-2017 he was the Polish Country Team Leader for the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). He received his B.A. (First Class) in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and an M.Phil. degree in Economics at the University of Oxford (1999). In 2006 he received his Ph.D. degree at the University of Warsaw and in 2015 he completed his habilitation at the School of Business and Economics of the Freie Universität Berlin. His work has focused on modelling of labour market behaviour, the relationship between health and employment, the structure of personal taxes and benefits and determinants of regional development. He has published in the American Economic Journal – Economic Policy, Journal of Health Economics, Social Science and Medicine, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics and other journals.