State and federal policymakers grappling with the aftermath of the Great Recession sought ways to spur job creation, in many cases adopting hiring credits to encourage employers to create new jobs. However, there is virtually no evidence on the effects of these kinds of counter-recessionary...

This paper evaluates the impact of an unexpected temporary hiring credit targeted at workers paid below 1.6 times the minimum wage in firms with less than 10 employees in France from December 2008 to December 2009. Using rich administrative data covering all French firms, we find that the...