International audienceThis paper shows that urban geography matters to the effectiveness of place-based policies, using the French enterprise zone program as a case study. Whereas this program created more jobs in spatially integrated neighborhoods, its impact on local wages was only visible in the more isolated ones. In addition, a focus on the average impact of the program would lead to the conclusion that it mostly succeeded in displacing preexisting firms, but a lower level of spatial isolation was a clear determinant of the decision to create new firms from scratch

We build a dynamic model of migration where, in addition to standard relocation costs, workers face spatial frictions that decrease their ability to compete for distant job opportunities. We estimate the model on a matched employer–employee panel dataset describing labour market transitions within and between the 100 largest French cities. Our identification strategy is based on the premise that frictions affect the frequency of job transitions, while mobility costs impact the distribution of accepted wages. We find that: (1) controlling for spatial frictions reduces mobility cost estimates by one order of magnitude; (2) the urban wage premium is driven by better opportunities for local job-to-job transitions in larger cities; (3) migration reduces lifetime inequalities by providing insurance against unsatisfactory initial location draws; (4) labour mobility policies based on relocation subsidies are inefficient, unlike switching from nationwide to local minimum wages.

Les documents de travail ne reflètent pas la position du CREST et n'engagent que leurs auteurs. Working papers do not reflect the position of CREST but only the views of the authors.

We build and calibrate a model of simultaneous transitions on the housing and the labor market in order to account for the residual unemployment gap between African immigrants and non-immigrants in France. Our framework allows us to distinguish between the impact of ethnic-specific geographical preferences and ethnic-specific barriers to these two markets. The labor market accounts for about 85% of the residual unemployment gap, whereas the housing market accounts for about 75% of the ethnic differences in geographical location. Geographical preferences do not substantially impact the unemployment gap and account for about 25% of differences in residential location.

This paper describes a novel concept of customer discrimination in the housing market, neighbor discrimination. We build up a matching model with ethnic externalities where landlords differ in the number of apartments they own within the same building. Larger landlords discriminate more often only if some tenants are prejudiced against the minority group. Testing the null hypothesis whereby minority tenants are equally likely to have a large landlord provides a natural test for the existence of neighbor discrimination. In an empirical application, we show that this null hypothesis is rejected for African immigrants in the French private rental market. We then show that the local proportion of large landlords is positively correlated with African tenants' probability of living in public housing, whereas this is not the case of other demographic groups.JEL codes: R21, J71.

No abstract

The Geography of Unemployment of First and Second-generation Africans in France: 2) Why such a Low Residential Mobility ? We use the French Housing Survey and analyze the residential mobility of people of African origins. We show that African people are overrepresented in large cities with respect to the rest of the population. We highlight two key factors behind this statement: the geographic concentration of social housing in dense areas and ethnic discrimination in the housing market. The interplay between these factors originates an African bias towards social housing: African people are more likely to enter social housing, and less likely to exit. These results are robust to controls for individual characteristics.

No abstract