Financial giant Merrill Lynch, which maintains millions of square feet of office space downtown and employs almost 10,000 highly paid people at its world headquarters complex in the World Financial Center and another downtown site, has begun considering what it will do once its World Financial Center lease expires in seven years, press reports and other people familiar with the plans say.

Those plans, these sources say, could include leaving the city that the firm has called home since 1914.

While calling chatter that the firm might move premature, a corporate spokeswoman didn’t deny the firm is looking.

“Like any well-managed company, we are in the midst of evaluating our options given that we have an impending lease expiration in 2013,” the Merrill Lynch spokeswoman, Selina Morris, told The New York Sun.

Possible relocation sites the firm is considering include New Jersey, and the Hotel Pennsylvania on the West Side, Crain’s New York Business reported. Bloomberg News reported that Merrill is also considering moving into the office space owned by developer Larry Silverstein that is being rebuilt at ground zero, near Merrill Lynch’s current headquarters.

If Merrill were to leave New York City, it would be a significant blow to the city’s economy, and even if it were to move to Midtown from downtown, it would call into question downtown’s recovery as a financial center following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Similar worries swirled when officials of another financial firm, Goldman Sachs, were reportedly considering a move.

Goldman decided to stay after Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki offered the firm Liberty Bonds and tax breaks.

And yesterday, a spokesman for the city’s Economic Development Corporation — who noted that downtown is flourishing with new housing, parks, and commercial leases — seemed to believe that Merrill would opt to stay as well.

“We’re confident that after exploring all of its options,” the spokesman, Andrew Brent, said in a statement, “Merrill Lynch will conclude that Lower Manhattan is where it wants to be more than ever.”

The managing director of the Carlton Group, a real estate investment banking company, John Bralower, concurred.

“New York City still has things to offer that nowhere else in the country does, and Merrill’s going to have to weigh that against economic considerations, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they ultimately end up staying in Manhattan,” Mr. Bralower said.

A spokesman for Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said Mr. Silver is “reaching out” to Merrill Lynch to encourage the firm to remain in Manhattan.

If Merrill does decide to stay, it won’t be because other cities aren’t trying.

Last month, a developer in Pennsylvania flew Wall Street executives by helicopter to the Keystone State to woo them to relocate at least part of their operations in a new development being called Wall Street West.

After protests from New York politicians, the developer said he has no desire to poach from New York City. But one of the people aboard Pennsylvania developer Larry Simon’s helicopters was an assistant vice president of Merrill Lynch, Steven Giuca.