Miren Lafourcade published her article “Can Tax Breaks Beat Geography? Lessons from the French Enterprise Zone Experience“, co-authored with Anthony Briant and Benoît Schmutz, in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2015, 7(2): 88-124.
Abstract: This paper shows that urban geography matters to the effectiveness of place-based policies, using the French enterprise zone program as a case study. Whereas this program created more jobs in spatially integrated neighborhoods, its impact on local wages was only visible in the more isolated ones. In addition, a focus on the average impact of the program would lead to the conclusion that it mostly succeeded in displacing preexisting firms, but a lower level of spatial isolation was a clear determinant of the decision to create new firms from scratch.