Master 2 memoir under the supervision of Pr. Fabien Candau at the University of Pau
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Deindustrialization marked the decline of industry dependent regions. Delocal- ized or bankrupt companies left behind factories and other industrial facilities. A rich literature grew on the economic, social and health hazard they can pose to surrounding communities and how their remediation can improve the well-being of surrounding inhabitants. However the literature mostly focused on housing prices and health benefits their redevelopment can bring and lit- tle has been done to estimate the impact of cleaning up a brownfield on the median income due to the potential incentivizing effect for reinvestment it can have. Using data of the ADEME on 420 brownfields, and retrieving data from the Land Information System, the BRGM and from local city halls and prefectures to retrieve the date when the cleanups ended and merging it with neighborhood-level census data. I use the latest Difference-in-Differences ap- proaches to estimate the impact of brownfields cleanup on median income. We find no significant impact of the cleanup on the median income in surrounding neighborhoods. Our findings align with past literature that cleanup in itself has no visible effect on the surrounding community and that cleanup should be included in vast remediation and redevelopment efforts of the overall urban landscape in which they are included.