State aid for broadband and crowding out of private investment: Evidence from the French market
研究了法国宽带光纤部署中公共补贴是否挤出了私人投资，发现36%的补贴可能替代了本会在三年内发生的私人投资，但补贴也加速了早期覆盖。
In this paper, we investigate the potential crowding out of private investment by public subsidies in the deployment of broadband fiber networks. We estimate a model of fiber entry using a rich dataset on fiber deployment for more than 34,000 municipalities in mainland France from 2014 to 2019. We then assess whether private investment would have occurred in subsidized municipalities in the absence of state aid. We find that in 36 % of cases, public subsidies were allocated to municipalities where private entry would have occurred within three years. We estimate that about 902 million euros of the total 2203 million euros in total subsidies disbursed by the end of 2019 may have crowded out private investment. However, we also show that the French broadband plan accelerated fiber coverage in subsidized municipalities in the early stages of deployment.