Willing and able to cheat? Self-reported versus third-party-verified claims in EU farm payments

Stefanos Tyros will present joint research with Theo Saroglou and Marica Valente.

The Common Agricultural Policy is the largest item in the EU's budget, yet much of it is paid on self-reported information. Farm subsidies flow through two channels: money per animal, released only against a national livestock register, and money per hectare of grazing land, paid on the claimant's word. In 2017 an EU decision aimed at livestock holders made millions of hectares of Greek shrubland claimable by anyone, on the self-reported channel. Using the universe of payments to Greek claimants over eleven years, we find that the new land was taken up by claimants who mostly never went on to keep a single registered animal, and that their claims vanished when checking resumed. The cost was borne by the real herders the decision was meant to help, whose income did not rise as intended.

Meet our speaker and chair

Stefanos Tyros is a physicist and an economist, currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck. Before that he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Business School and he holds a PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Tinbergen Institute. His research spans labour economics and public policy: how workers, organisations and technology adoption interact, and, currently, the public economics of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy. He also writes a data-driven column on the Greek economy for WIRED Greece and is a dad to two children.

Professor Vassilis Monastiriotis is Director of the LSE Centre for Research on Contemporary Greece and Cyprus - Hellenic Observatory, Professor in Political Economy and Eleftherios Venizelos Chair of Contemporary Greek Studies at the European Institute, LSE.

The Hellenic Observatory (@HO_LSE) is internationally recognised as one of the premier research centres on contemporary Greece and Cyprus. It engages in a range of activities, including developing and supporting academic and policy-related research; organisation of conferences, seminars and workshops; academic exchange through visiting fellowships and internships; as well as teaching at the graduate level through LSE's European Institute.

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