Homeownership and job-match quality in France

Our empirical study stems from previous research on the inter-relations between residential status and microeconomic labour market outcomes. It focuses on employees and assesses the a priori ambiguous effect of homeownership on job-match quality. We use the French data set of the 1995-2001 European Community Household Panel to build a subjective measure of job downgrading. We estimate a recursive trivariate probit with partial observability that simultaneously models the residential status choice, its impact on the probability of being downgraded, and the selection into employment. The comparison with simpler models indicates that taking into account the selection into employment and controlling unobservable individual heterogeneity are of prime necessity to obtain robust conclusions.