Large shocks, such as natural disasters, are often found to have little or no effect on the equilibrium distribution of economic activity across space. Two apparently competing theoretical explanations for this phenomenon are the increasing returns theory and the locational fundamentals theory....

This paper evaluates the effect of the French enterprise zone program on residents of these deprived neighborhoods. A second contribution is the evaluation of the composition effects in the zones and of externalities on the neighbors of the enterprise zones. The third contribution is the...