The Effect of Segregation and Spatial Mismatch on Unemployment: Evidence from France

In this paper, we investigate how residential segregation and bad physical access to jobs contribute to urban unemployment in the Paris region. We first survey the general mechanisms according to which residential segregation and spatial mismatch can have adverse labour-market outcomes. We then discuss the extent of the problem with the help of relevant descriptive statistics computed from the 1999 Census of the Population and from the 2000 General Transport Survey. Finally, we estimate the effect of indices of segregation computed at the neighbourhood and municipality levels, as well as job accessibility indices on the labour-market transitions out of unemployment using the 1990-2002 Labour Force Survey. Our results show that neighbourhood segregation is a key factor that prevents unemployed workers from finding a job. These results are robust to potential location endogeneity biases.