Spatial Mobility and Returns to Education:Some Evidence from a Sample of French Youth

The purpose of this article is to reevaluate the returns to geographic mobility and to the levelof education, taking into account the interaction between these two variables. We have at ourdisposal an original French database that permits precise calculation of the distance betweenthe place of education and the location of first employment. We thus capture mobility withouta priori regarding the geographical areas selected, and we use kilometric thresholds toestimate the returns to spatial mobility. Our results suggest decreasing returns to spatialmobility as the distance covered rises and increasing returns to mobility with higher levels ofeducation. In addition, for all levels of education, including the lowest, returns to geographicmobility prove to be positive, for one threshold at least and several distances.