Neighborhood effects, public housing and unemployment in France

Neighborhood effects, public housing and unemployment in France

[SHS:ECO] Humanities and Social Sciences/Economy and finances

Neighborhood effects

public housing

unemployment

simultaneous probit models

simulated maximum likelihood

This paper is aimed at examining how individual unemployment is influenced both by location in a deprived neighborhood and public housing. Our identification strategy is twofold. First, we estimate a simultaneous probit model of public housing accommodation, type of neighborhood, and unemployment, thus accounting explicitely for correlation of unobservables between the three behaviors. Second, we take advantage of the situation of the public housing sector in France, which allows us to use public housing accommodation as a powerful<br />determinant of neighborhood choices and to use household's demographic characteristics as exclusion restrictions. Our results show that public housing does not have any direct effect on unemployment. However, living within the 35% more deprived neighborhoods does increase the unemployment probability significantly. As expected, the effect of neighborhood substantially decreases when dealing with the endogeneity of neighborhood and when using public housing as a determinant of neighborhood choice.

Goffette-Nagot, Florence

Dujardin, Claire

Neighborhood effects, public housing and unemployment in France

2006-04

ENG

invited conference talk

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00133854

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/13/63/84/PDF/dujardin_goffette_JEG_march2007.pdf

Lille

France