Contractual Risk Transfer and the Pace of Fibre Deployment. Evidence from French Public Initiative Networks

Transferring investment risk to a private delegatee is frequently advocated as a means of accelerating the construction of public infrastructure. Yet its effectiveness remains ambiguous: an operator that finances the asset has a direct interest in completing it quickly, but also bears a financing cost that a publicly funded operator does not. In France, fibre deployment in commercially unattractive territories is entrusted to Public Initiative Networks, whose delegating authorities choose between arrangements that retain investment responsibility and arrangements that transfer it. Using a quarterly panel of 56 networks observed from 2018 to 2026, constructed from the regulator’s commune-level open data, we investigate whether this choice is associated with the pace at which networks cover their territories. Our econometric analysis, based on a measure of deployment effort normalised by the remaining stock of connectable premises and on randomisation inference at the network level, yields two key findings. First, networks transferring investment responsibility cover their residual territory 4.6 percentage points faster per quarter, roughly thirty percent above the sample mean and some fifteen months in the date at which a territory is substantially served. Second, the association is concentrated among small and medium-sized networks and attenuates among large regional consortia, suggesting that the layering of governance across tiers of local government dilutes the incentives contractual form is meant to create. These findings provide new insights into the organisational design of subsidised infrastructure programmes, suggesting that the contractual architecture through which public money is spent deserves attention alongside its amount and its targeting.