Big Wins, Small Net Gains: Direct and Spillover Effects of First Industry Entries in Puerto Rico

Jorge A. Arroyo

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: I study how first sizable industry entries reshape local and neighboring labor markets in Puerto Rico. Using over a decade of quarterly municipality--industry data (2014Q1--2025Q1), I identify ``first sizable entries'' as large, persistent jumps in establishments, covered employment, and wage bill, and treat these as shocks to local industry presence at the municipio--industry level. Methodologically, I combine staggered-adoption difference-in-differences estimators that are robust to heterogeneous treatment timing with an imputation-based event-study approach, and I use a doubly robust difference-in-differences framework that explicitly allows for interference through pre-specified exposure mappings on a contiguity graph. The estimates show large and persistent direct gains in covered employment and wage bill in the treated municipality--industry cells over 0--16 quarters. Same-industry neighbors experience sizable short-run gains that reverse over the medium run, while within-municipality cross-industry and neighbor all-industries spillovers are small and imprecisely estimated. Once these spillovers are taken into account and spatially robust inference and sensitivity checks are applied, the net regional 0--16 quarter effect on covered employment is positive but modest in magnitude and estimated with considerable uncertainty. The results imply that first sizable entries generate substantial local gains where they occur, but much smaller and less precisely measured net employment gains for the broader regional economy, highlighting the importance of accounting for spatial spillovers when evaluating place-based policies.

Date: 2025-11, Revised 2025-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19469 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2511.19469

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().