Территории опережающего развития и занятость в моногородах Российской Федерации

The paper examines the impact of priority development areas (PDA) on the economic diversification of Russia's cities. The research question of the work is this: did the creation of priority development areas contribute to a decrease in the share of employees in the city-forming enterprise and an increase in the number of operating firms? The main data sources are EMISS and SPARK-Interfax. The collected data of operating firms in a single-industry town, the number of employees in a city-forming enterprise, and other variables were converted into a panel for 2015–2021 for 279 cities. Since cities received status of PDA in different years, the method of difference in differences with multiple periods was applied along with the panel matching. The work tests the main hypothesis:“Assigning the status of PDA to a single-industry town ensures a significant increase in the number of new enterprises.” As a result of the analysis, it was revealed that, according to the panel matching, the assignment of the priority development area status increases the number of new firms after 2 and 3 years after assigning, but, according to the staggered adoption difference-in-differences, the results are not significant.