The impact of Urban Enterprise Zones on establishment location decisions and labor market outcomes: evidence from France

Journal article: In this article, we study the impact of a French enterprise zone program—the ‘Zones Franches Urbaines’ (ZFUs) policy—on establishment location decisions and on labor market outcomes. Our main identification strategy, which combines spatial and time differencing, shows that conditional 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. We also show that 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.

Author(s)

Thierry Mayer, Florian Mayneris, Loriane Py

Journal
  • Journal of Economic Geography
Date of publication
  • 2017
Keywords JEL
R12 R38 R58
Keywords
  • Firm location
  • Enterprise zones
  • Employment
  • Wages
  • Spatial differencing
Internal reference
  • 2441/9labe9r4se65i7896860li228
Pages
  • 709 – 752
Version
  • 1
Volume
  • 17