Neighborhood effects, public housing and unemployment in France

This paper is aimed to examine how individual unemployment is influenced both by location in a deprived neighborhood and public housing. Our identification strategy is twofold. First, because we estimate a simultaneous probit model of public housing accommodation, type of neighborhood, and unemployment, the formal identification of the model relies on non-linearities. Second, we take advantage of the location of the public housing sector in France, which allows us to use public housing accommodation as a powerful determinant of neighborhood choices. 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.