Cluster policies and firm selection: Evidence from france

In this paper, we shed light on the selection of the beneficiaries from the French competitiveness cluster policy which was launched in 2005 and extended to 2012. We disentangle the selection and self-selection effects, as emphasized in the theoretical literature on regional and industrial policy. Our main conclusion is that winners were (self-)selected at both steps of the procedure, and that this holds for the three cluster types: worldwide clusters, potentially worldwide clusters and national clusters. We thus provide a methodology which allows us to contrast the effective outcomes of the selection process and the official objectives of cluster policies in terms of targeting, and which thus helps in their econometric evaluation