When it comes to evaluating the causal effect of public policies on corporate performance, most studies tend to focus exclusively on targeted firms, as if these firms have no relationship to the rest of the economy. Yet, public policies are highly likely to influence non-targeted firms indirectly due to the relationships they have with targeted firms. This paper aims to fill this gap by evaluating the indirect causal effect of a new French cluster-innovation policy on the financial and employment outcomes of non-targeted companies. To do so, it focuses on French Technological Research Institutes, which are science-industry collaborations based on technology platforms that bring together SMEs, large companies, universities, and public research bodies with the goal of accelerating the transfer of knowledge towards firms and generating spillovers (indirect effects) inside and outside the scheme. Based on the literature on spillover effects and agglomeration economies, it can be assumed that industry-specific spillovers tend to be spatially concentrated. By comparing a non-targeted firm located in the NUTS-3 regions within which the policy was implemented (referred to as "treated regions"), to a non-targeted firm outside of these "treated regions", using a difference-in-differences method with fixed effects applied to panel data (2008–2016) combined with a double matching at the NUTS-3 region and firm level, we find that non-targeted firms located in the "treated regions" significantly improve their financial performance (turnover, financial autonomy) compared to control firms located in the NUTS-3 control regions. The dynamics of employment outcomes are ambiguous. A negative significant effect is observed on the proportion of managers at the beginning of the policy and a positive significant effect is noted later, at the end of the period of observation. An analysis of the dynamics of the effects indicates that performance does not improve immediately after the policy, but later in time.

在评估公共政策对企业绩效的因果影响时，大多数研究往往只关注目标企业，就好像这些企业与经济的其他部分没有关系。然而，由于非目标公司与目标公司的关系，公共政策极有可能间接影响它们。本文旨在通过评估法国新的集群创新政策对非目标公司的财务和就业结果的间接因果影响来填补这一空白。为此，它专注于法国技术研究所，它们是基于技术平台的科学与工业合作，将中小企业、大公司、大学、和公共研究机构，其目标是加速知识向企业的转移并在计划内外产生溢出效应（间接影响）。根据关于溢出效应和集聚经济的文献，可以假设特定行业的溢出往往在空间上集中。通过比较位于实施政策的 NUTS-3 区域（称为“处理区域”）中的非目标公司与这些“处理区域”之外的非目标公司，使用差异：将固定效应的差异方法应用于面板数据（2008-2016）结合 NUTS-3 区域和公司层面的双重匹配，我们发现位于“处理区域”的非目标公司显着提高了其财务绩效（营业额, 财务自主权）与位于 NUTS-3 控制区域的控制公司相比。就业结果的动态是不明确的。在政策开始时观察到对管理人员比例的负面显着影响，在观察期结束时观察到积极的显着影响。对影响动态的分析表明，政策实施后性能不会立即提高，而是会在一段时间后提高。