Does Winning a 'Million Dollar Plant' Increase Welfare?
Bidding for Industrial Plants: Does Winning a ‘Million Dollar Plant’ Increase Welfare? Michael Greenstone MIT, American Bar Foundation and NBER Enrico Moretti University of California, Berkeley and NBER November 2004 We thank Alberto Abadie, Michael Ash, Hal Cole, David Card, Gordon Dahl, Thomas Davidoff, Michael Davidson, Rajeev Dehejia, Stefano Della Vigna, Mark Duggan, Jinyong Hahn, Robert Haveman, Vernon Henderson, Ali Hortacsu, Matthew Kahn, Tom Kane, Brian Knight, Alan Krueger, Steve Levitt, Boyan Jovanovic, David Lee, Therese McGuire, Derek Neal, Matthew Neidell, Aviv Nevo, John Quigley, Karl Scholz, Chad Syverson, Duncan Thomas and seminar participants at Berkeley, Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Illinois, Michigan, NYU, NBER Summer Institute, Rice, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Wisconsin for very helpful discussions. Adina Allen, Ben Bolitzer, Justin Gallagher, Genevieve Pham- Kanter, Yan Lee, Sam Schulhofer-Wohl, Antoine St-Pierre, and William Young provided outstanding research assistance. Greenstone acknowledges generous funding from the American Bar Foundation. Moretti thanks the UCLA Senate for a generous grant. Bidding for Industrial Plants: Does Winning a ‘Million Dollar Plant’ Increase Welfare? Abstract Increasingly, local governments compete by offering substantial subsidies to industrial plants to locate within their jurisdictions. This paper uses a novel research design to estimate the local consequences of successfully bidding for an industrial plant, relative to bidding and losing, on labor earnings, public finances, and property values. Each issue of the corporate real estate journal Site Selection includes an article titled "The Million Dollar Plant" that reports the county where a large plant chose to locate (i.e., the 'winner'), as well as the one or two runner-up counties (i.e., the 'losers').
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