Cluster policies and firm selection : evidence from France

We shed light on the selection of beneficiaries from the French competitiveness cluster policy, 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,” “potentially worldwide,” and “national clusters.” We thus provide a methodology which allows to contrast the effective outcomes of the selection process and the official objectives of cluster policies in terms of targeting, helping in their econometric evaluation