Foreign fees and customers'cash withdrawals

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of foreign fees, paid by consumers when they withdraw cash at banks that are not their own, on their withdrawals. We take advantage of a natural experiment whereby (non linear) payment fees for withdrawing cash at foreign ATMs were introduced at one point in time. We also use this experiment to evaluate the substitutions between foreign withdrawals and various other means of payment such as own bank or desk withdrawals, payments by card or cheque. Using panel data on accounts at one specific bank, we first estimate reduced form treatment effect models before carrying on with the estimation of a structural model. The latter allows us to compute the counterfactual impacts of changing the non linear schedule of foreign fees. Impacts are sizeable and in particular on bank profits

Do unemployed workers benefit from enterprise zones? The French experience

This paper is a statistical evaluation of the 1997 enterprise zone program in France. We investigate whether the program increased the pace at which unemployed workers residing in targeted municipalities and surrounding areas find employment. The work relies on a two- stage analysis of unemployment spells drawn from an exhaustive dataset over the 1993-2003 period in the Paris region. We first estimate a duration model stratified by municipalities in order to recover semester-specific municipality effects net of individual observed heterogeneity. These effects are estimated both before and after the implementation of the program, allowing us to construct variants of difference-in-difference estimators of the impact of the program at the municipality level. Following extensive robustness checks, we conclude that enterprise zones have a very small but significant effect on the rate at which unemployed workers find a job. The effect remains localized and is shown to be significant only in the short run.