Foreign Opportunity and Regional Revival: Evidence from the French Rust Belt

This paper studies whether and how distressed regions can recover from industrial decline. We exploit differences in access to an increasingly thriving Luxembourg labor market for neighboring residents of the French “Rust Belt.” We document a three-phase expansion of treated local labor markets, driven by an initial workplace substitution of incumbent residents towards cross-border job opportunities, a medium-term rise in local labor force utilization, and a long-run sustained increase in population via net domestic in-migration. A broader process of local revitalization follows, with higher incomes, reduced reliance on transfers, and resilience to social dislocation, although it is partially offset by rising housing costs and unequal congestion. This leads to a net decrease in far-right and anti- EU vote shares, muting the rise of populism visible elsewhere in former industrial regions of France. Our findings suggest that former industrial regions are not inherently rigid nor doomed to fall to anti-globalization backlash, but can and do adjust – given sufficiently large-scale reversals in local labor demand.