VERDUGO Gregory

We study the impact of local immigration inflows on natives’ wages using a large French administrative panel from 1976-2007. We show that local immigration inflows are followed by reallocations of blue-collar natives across commuting zones. Because these reallocations vary with the initial occupation and blue-collar location movers have wages below the blue-collar average, controlling for changes in local composition is crucial to assess how wages adjust to immigration. Immigration temporarily lowers the wages of blue-collar workers, with unskilled workers experiencing larger losses. Location movers lose more than stayers in terms of daily wages but move to locations with cheaper housing.

The law on real equality between women and men passed in 2014 introduced the PreParE (Prestation partagée d'éducation de l'enfant). Its objective was to encourage the use of parental leave by fathers to devote more time to parental tasks and, on the other hand, to encourage mothers to return to the labor market more quickly in order to contribute to the reduction of professional inequalities related to the arrival of a child. The law modifies the duration and distribution of the right to the allowance between parents: for a first child, the maximum duration of payment has been extended from six months to be shared between the two parents before the reform to six months for each parent after the reform. from the second child onwards, the reform reduces the period of compensation to a maximum of two years for the same parent instead of three initially, which obliges the other parent to take part of the leave to cover the period until the child is three years old. Using data from the file of recipients made available by the Cnaf, we evaluate the effects of the switch to PreParE on the use of the benefit and on families' income. The method and additional results are detailed in a working paper (Périvier and Verdugo, 2021). Main results on the use of the scheme: 1) Fathers' use of the parental leave allowance hardly increased: ■ For full leave, fathers' use increased from 0.5 percent to 0.8 percent regardless of the child's rank. ■ For part-time leave, the use of fathers of a first child increased from 0.7 percent to 0.9 percent and that of fathers with two or more children from 1 percent to 1.8 percent . ■ These rates remain well below the stated goals of 25% of fathers taking leave. 2) A large majority of fathers working part-time did not use the scheme: ■ We estimate that 70% of fathers (compared with only 25% of mothers) working part-time gave up the parental leave allowance to which they are entitled without changing their activity behavior and, since the reform, without reducing their spouse's leave entitlement. Main effects on household income: The activity income (labor income and unemployment benefits) of mothers, among those who had a non-zero activity income two years before the birth, increased substantially while that of fathers remained unchanged: ■ On average this increase compensates for the loss of the allowance during the third year. ■ The increase in mothers' labor force earnings reduced the earnings gap between parents three years after the child's birth by 14 percent . ■ The effects of the reform on household incomes varied greatly according to mothers' initial income levels, measured two years before the birth. Finally, the reform had no effect on the couple's probability of having another child or of separating within five years of the birth.

We examine the consequences of recent policies promoting parental leave sharing using a 2015 French reform. The reform reduced the duration of mothers’ paid leave to give 12 months of non transferable leave to fathers. Leave can be taken while working part-time for up to 80% of standard working hours, which can be a more attractive option for fathers. We find that the take-up rates for fathers remained low, as less than 3% of fathers took any form of leave after the reform. Surprisingly, we also find low take-up rates for fathers working part-time after the reform and for whom taking paid part-time leave would have increased their median income by 15% without requiring them to change in their labour supply. For fathers working part-time, non-take-up rates of part-time leave benefits are as high as 81% compared with less than 25% for mothers. The reform dramatically increased the annual earnings of mothers, but it had no effect on the earnings of fathers.

This thesis studies the frictions that alter the matching processes between labor supply and demand. The matching of aggregate labor supply and demand partly explains employment and wage levels. However, imbalances remain in many labor markets. Despite radical changes such as globalization and the digitalization of job search, these imbalances persist. This thesis is therefore organized around two axes studying the frictions associated with these two important phenomena. The first axis is dedicated to the globalization of the labor market and foreign workers. The first two chapters of this thesis are devoted to this. The first chapter focuses on a friction affecting foreign workers in Germany. It documents how cultural differences with their country of origin lead to a penalty on their wages. The second chapter examines a friction related to employers. It documents the difficulties of American employers in recruiting domestic workers for jobs associated with new technologies. It thus explains, in part, why these employers seek to recruit foreign workers. The second section of the thesis is dedicated to the digitalization of the labor market. The third chapter explores an information friction emanating from the digitalization of the job search. It quantifies the share of obsolete ads online on three of the major US job boards. Thus, it documents a negative externality wasting job seekers' search time and effort.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the structure of European labour markets has changed in two main ways: first, more and more women have been participating in the labour market, even during the crisis, and the female participation rates between European countries, which were once far apart, have dramatically converged. Second, the labor market appears increasingly polarized. The term "polarization" refers to the disappearance of intermediate jobs in favor of either low-skilled or very high-skilled jobs. In this chapter we show that gender and labor market polarization are intertwined in Europe more than elsewhere, because growing jobs, in response to polarization, are much more often occupied by women. In contrast, men are in the majority in declining intermediate jobs. [First paragraph].

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This thesis is composed of three chapters, each of which evaluates the effects of a spatialized housing policy in France. The first two chapters apply a quasi-experimental methodology to evaluate, for the first of them, the effects of Article 55 of the 2000 "Solidarités et Renouvellement Urbain" law, which aims at stimulating the construction of social housing in medium and large municipalities, and for the second the Scellier tax credit, which applies from 2008 to 2012 to rental investment targeted at low-income tenants. The evaluation focuses on several variables of interest: housing construction, but also real estate prices and the spatial segregation of income. The third chapter applies microsimulation methods to estimate the profile of the share of income devoted by households to paying the housing tax. It also proposes a simulation of this profile under the hypothesis of a revision of rental values, which constitute the tax base of this local tax and which, in the absence of any revision since they were introduced, reflect the market values of housing in the 1970s. The three chapters are based on the exploitation of databases produced by the tax administration or French notaries, which are exhaustive and very rich and which have been little used until now. The first two chapters show that the financial or fiscal incentives put in place make it possible to stimulate the local supply of social housing or private rental housing targeted at low-income households. Chapter 1 shows that this increase in social construction has led to a decrease in property prices and spatial segregation of incomes in the municipalities concerned. Chapter 2 shows that housing built under the Scellier scheme is more often vacant and that the measure has led to an increase in property prices in the areas treated, as a result of increased tension in the local housing markets, which is capitalized on in land prices. Finally, Chapter 3 shows that aligning the rental values that serve as a basis for the housing tax with the relative prices of housing observed in today's real estate markets leads to a radical change in the profile of the weight of this levy in household income as a function of that income: whereas this has the shape of a bell curve with a maximum tax effort for households around the median income for the tax in its current form, the revision studied leads to a more progressive profile for most French households.

This thesis examines the interaction between migration and productivity from different perspectives across three countries and time periods. Specifically, I study the labor market mobility benefits of migrants during economic downturns, the productivity gains from migrant mobility during a country's post-war reconstruction, and the gains associated with higher population concentration in large urban areas. I address these topics both theoretically and empirically, using rich confidential social security data from Spain, Germany, and Turkey, using various panel data techniques as well as historical instruments to estimate causal relationships. The results of these studies address many issues that are of interest to both academia and policymakers, but about which little is yet known. This dissertation aims to contribute to improving our knowledge on issues that will remain relevant in the near future.

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Recent decades have seen a rapid increase in the share of non-European immigrants in public housing in Europe, which has led to concern regarding the rise of ghettos in large cities. Using French census data over three decades, we examine how this increase in public housing participation has affected segregation. While segregation levels have increased moderately, on average, the number of immigrant enclaves has grown. The growth of enclaves is being driven by the large increase in non-European immigrants in the census tracts where the largest housing projects are located, both in the housing projects and the surrounding nonpublic dwellings. As a result, contemporary differences in segregation levels across metropolitan areas are being shaped by the concentration of public housing within cities, in particular the share of non-European immigrants in large housing projects constructed before the 1980s. Nevertheless, the overall effect of public housing on segregation has been ambiguous. While large projects have increased segregation, the inflows of non-European immigrants into small projects have brought many immigrants into census tracts where they have previously been rare and, thus, diminished segregation levels.

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On the one hand, there are the less qualified, whose employment is deteriorating, and on the other hand, the highly qualified, the darlings of an economy that is increasingly greedy for skills. On the one hand, poorly paid jobs with no interest or prospects for advancement, on the other hand, jobs with high salaries, valued knowledge, career opportunities... The polarization of the labor market, a striking phenomenon of the last two decades, affects most countries. It is reflected in an explosion of wage differentials and an increased risk of unemployment and casualization. The causes are multiple - technological change, globalization, deindustrialization, etc. - and their effects are mutually reinforcing. - and their effects are mutually reinforcing. Is this phenomenon inevitable? With the disappearance of intermediate jobs, are we witnessing the programmed death of the middle class or will we manage to adapt our economies to this new situation?

On the one hand, there are the less qualified, whose employment is deteriorating, and on the other hand, the highly qualified, the darlings of an economy that is increasingly greedy for skills. On the one hand, poorly paid jobs with no interest or prospects for advancement, on the other hand, jobs with high salaries, valued knowledge, career opportunities... The polarization of the labor market, a striking phenomenon of the last two decades, affects most countries. It is reflected in an explosion of wage differentials and an increased risk of unemployment and casualization. The causes are multiple - technological change, globalization, deindustrialization, etc. - and their effects are mutually reinforcing. - and their effects are mutually reinforcing. Is this phenomenon inevitable? With the disappearance of intermediate jobs, are we witnessing the programmed death of the middle class or will we manage to adapt our economies to this new situation?

We study the response of real wages to the business cycle in eight major Eurozone countries before and during the Great Recession. Average real wages are found to be acyclical, but this reflects, in large part, the effect of changes in the composition of the labour force related to unemployment variations over the cycle. Using longitudinal micro data from the ECHP and SILC panels to control for composition effects, we estimate the elasticities of real wage growth to unemployment increases between −0.6 and −1 over the period 1994–2011. Composition effects have been particularly large since 2008, and they explain most of the stagnation or increase in the average wage observed in some countries from 2008 to 2011. In contrast, at a constant labour force composition in terms of education and experience, the figures indicate a significant decrease in average wages during the downturn, particularly in countries most affected by the crisis. Overall, there is no evidence of downward nominal wage rigidity during the Great Recession in most countries in our sample.

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This paper investigates how a reform allowing immigrants with children in France access to public housing during the 1970s influenced their initial location choices across local labour markets. We find that cities with higher public housing supplies have a large 'magnetic effect' on the location choice. The estimated effect is substantial and quantitatively similar to the effect of the size of the ethnic group in the urban area. In cities with higher public housing supply, these immigrants tend to benefit from better housing conditions, but non-European immigrants are also more likely to be unemployed.

In coordination with the ECB and 24 other national central banks of the European Union, the Banque de France interrogated 1150 French firms to understand how the crisis affected their economic environment and their human resources practices during the 2010-2013 period. A majority of workers were employed by firms which indicate that their activity was mostly affected by a decrease in demand considered as long-lasting by more than 40% of them, especially in the construction sector and among small firms. In contrast, less than 20% of firms (weighted by their employment) report that the unavailability of credit had an effect on their activity. Over the period, despite the economic downturn, the amount of total costs increased for 70% of firms (weighted by their employment) mainly through an increase in labour costs and secondly in the cost of supplies. In particular, base wages continued to increase for a large share of firms, suggesting strong downward wage rigidities. Many firms indicate substantial difficulties in adjusting the labour force: throughout the crisis it became more difficult to hire qualified employees, to adjust working hours or to move workers to different job positions. The joint presence of difficulties in finding employees and unemployment growth suggest that structural unemployment increased in France in recent years. Other factors considered as significantly constraining for employment growth by a large majority of firms are uncertainty about economic conditions, risks that labour laws are changed, high payroll taxes and firing costs.

We characterise how the assimilation patterns of minorities into the strong and the weak language differ in a situation of asymmetric bilingualism. Using large variations in language composition in Canadian cities from the 2001 and 2006 Censuses, we show that the differences in the knowledge of English by immigrant allophones (i.e. the immigrants with a mother tongue other than English and French) in English-majority cities are mainly due to sorting across cities. Instead, in French-majority cities, learning plays an important role in explaining differences in knowledge of French. In addition, the presence of large anglophone minorities deters much more the assimilation into French than the presence of francophone minorities deters the assimilation into English. Finally, we find that language distance plays a much more important role in explaining assimilation into French, and that assimilation into French is much more sensitive to individual characteristics than assimilation into English. Some of these asymmetric assimilation patterns extend to anglophone and francophone immigrants, but no evidence of learning is found in this case.

Wage inequality decreased continuously in France from 1969 to 2008. In contrast to the US and the UK, this period was also characterised by a substantial increase in the educational attainment of the labour force. This paper investigates whether differences in the timing of educational expansion over the last forty years can explain the divergent evolution of upper tail wage inequality in France relative to other countries. Using a model with imperfect substitution between experience groups, the estimates suggest that the rapid increase in the supply of educated workers during the 1970s and 1990s produced a substantial decline in the skill premium within cohorts. As a result, between a third and half of the decline in wage inequality at the top of the distribution in France during this period is explained by the increase in the educational attainment of the labour force.

Combining large (up to 25%) extracts of five French censuses and data from Labor Force Surveys for 1968-1999, we use Borjas (2003)'s factor proportions methodology for France and find that a 10 p.p. increase in the immigrant share raises natives' wages by 3.3%, which is in stark contrast with the results in Borjas (2003) for the U.S. The positive impact of immigration on natives' wages and employment is shown to hold also at the regional level. We find evidence that this positive correlation partly comes from the imperfect substitutability of natives and immigrants within education/experience cells. Specifically, (i) the occupational distribution of natives and immigrants within these cells is more dissimilar when there are more immigrants in the cell. (ii) natives tend to perform more abstract tasks when there are more immigrants in the cell. and (iii) an important part of the positive relation between immigration and wages comes from a reallocation of natives to better-paid occupations within the cells. However, we argue that this positive correlation is also likely to be related to the inability of the Borjas (2003) model to perfectly account for the important changes in the wage distribution and the educational level characterizing the French economy in this period.

This article explores the determinants of the initial location choice of immigrants who arrived in France between 1975 and 1990. We study the role of ethnic networks and social housing in location choice. By informing about the characteristics of social housing in a location, ethnic networks may make it more attractive and influence the location of immigrants from the same group. We test this hypothesis by estimating whether variations in the rate of access to public housing across ethnic groups and locations have an effect on the probability of choosing a location for a new immigrant. We find that new non-European immigrants in couples with children are attracted to urban units in which their group is overrepresented in public housing. These results suggest that social housing supply and ethnic networks interact and influence location choice.

By multiplying methodological approaches, this article sketches the segregated landscape of immigrants in France from 1968 to 2007, thanks to the unprecedented use of data from six censuses. From 1968 to 2007, the intensity of segregation in France declined at the level of each national origin of migrants, but increased for immigrants taken together. The decline by national origin is due to the combined effects of the shrinking of highly segregated neighborhoods and native-born neighborhoods. The increase in the segregation of immigrants taken together is due to the recomposition of immigration - from European to non-European - over the last 40 years. The study also shows the absence of neighborhoods populated by a single national origin. Finally, the focus on the "neighborhoods we talk about" masks the residential incorporation of the vast majority of migrants, even non-Europeans, thus contradicting the frequent representations of a ghettoized immigration.

Analysing restricted access census data, this paper examines the long-term trends of immigrant segregation in France from 1968 to 2007. Similar to other European countries, France experienced a rise in the proportion of immigrants in its population that was characterised by a new predominance of non-European immigration. Despite this, average segregation levels remained moderate. While the number of immigrant enclaves increased, particularly during the 2000s, the average concentration for most groups decreased because of a reduction of heavily concentrated census tracts and census tracts with few immigrants. Contradicting frequent assertions, neither mono-ethnic census tract nor ghettoes exist in France. By contrast, many immigrants live in census tracts characterised by a low proportion of immigrants from their own group and from all origins. A long residential period in France is correlated with lower concentrations and proportion of immigrants in the census tract for most groups, though these effects are sometimes modest. 1 The authors accessed the Census data via the Centre d'accès sécurisé distant (CASD), dedicated to the use of authorized researchers, following the approval of the Comité français du secret statistique. This research was partially supported by a French State grant ANR-10-EQPX-17 (Centre d'accès sécurisé aux données-CASD). We thank three anonymous referees for insightful comments. Jean-Louis Pan Ké Shon would also like to thank Loïc Wacquant for his comments during discussions in the early stage of this project. This paper does not necessarily reflect the views of the Banque de France.

This paper investigates whether increases in the minimum wage in France have the same impact on the average wage when intended to preserve the purchasing power of the minimum wage as when intended to raise it. We find that the impact of the minimum wage on the average wage is strong, but differs depending on the indexation factor. We also find some empirical evidence of circularity between the average wage and the minimum wage.

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