CEPII, Recherche et Expertise sur l'economie mondiale
Jeudi 16 juillet 2015
Florian Mayneris, Gianluca Orefice on The impact of Urban Enterprise Zones on establishments' location and labor market outcomes: Evidence from France

 
Workshop on the impact of a French enterprise zone program - the “Zones Franches Urbaines" (ZFUs) policy - on establishments' location decisions and on labor market outcomes.

The main identification strategy, which combines spatial and time differencing, shows that conditioning on locating in a municipality that hosts a ZFU, the policy has a positive and sizable impact on the probability to locate in the ZFU part rather than in the non-ZFU part of municipalities.

However, the impact is highly heterogeneous across zones, industries and firms. This positive effect is entirely due to within-municipality diversion effects.

Regarding labor market outcomes, the policy has a positive effect on employment, especially for low-wage workers.

As for wages, the effect is null for low-wage workers, and negative for high-wage ones.