Winner takes all? Factors shaping unequal selection in South Korea's urban regeneration projects

Urban regeneration grant programs aim to mitigate urban decline and promote balanced regional development. Competition-based grants often favor cities with stronger administrative capacity, robust fiscal conditions, or political alignment, thereby disadvantaging smaller or declining municipalities. This study empirically examines the factors influencing project selection in South Korea's Urban Regeneration New Deal initiative, analyzing 199 municipalities that received at least one project between 2017 and 2022. We employ a Zero-Truncated Negative Binomial (ZTNB) model suitable for count data without zero observations. The results show that urban decline indicators exert mixed effects rather than uniformly increasing the likelihood of selection. Statutory decline indicators are positively associated with project awards, whereas anticipatory decline indicators are negatively associated, s…