Benoît Schmutz

Residential Mobility and Unemployment of African Immigrants in France: A Calibration Approach

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 geographic 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 geographic location. Geographic preferences do not substantially impact the unemployment gap and account for about 25% of differences in residential location.

Job Search and Migration in a System of Cities

We build an equilibrium job search model, where workers engage in both off- and on-the-job search over a set of cities, to quantify the impact of spatial matching frictions and mobility costs on the job search process. Migration decisions, based on a dynamic utility trade-off between locations, can rationalize diverse wage dynamics as part of forward-looking spatial strategies. Our estimation results allow us to characterize each of the largest 200 French cities by a set of city-specific matching and amenity parameters and to measure the impact of distance on spatial constraints. We find that after controlling for frictions, mobility cost parameters are significantly lower than previously reported in the literature. Additional results include a robust positive correlation between on-the-job arrival rates and local wage dispersion, which provides new empirical support to the wage-posting framework and suggests an alternative explanation for the city size wage gap.

Neighbor Discrimination Theory and evidence from the French rental market

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 being confined to public housing projects, whereas this is not the case of other demographic groups.