| Abstract: |
This paper focuses on residential sorting by social and ethnic status in large
French urban areas. Our objective is to assess the relative importance of two
major determinants of segregation stressed by the economic literature
(Bartolome and Ross, 2003 ; Brueckner et al., 1999) : (i) "Alonso sorting over
space", due to the trade-off between land consumption and accessibility to the
central city and (ii) "Tiebout sorting over jurisdictions", due to the taste
for local public goods and by extension for all kinds of local public
amenities (e.g. neighborhood externalities). Our methodology draws on
Schmidheiny (2006). First, a conditional logit model is estimated for each
urban area, in which moving households are assumed to sort based on
jurisdiction distance to the central city and jurisdiction mean of households'
incomes (as a proxy for the level of public amenities). Second, our estimation
results are used to simulate the counterfactual residential patterns that
would prevail if, alternatively, one or the other of these mechanisms were
inactive (setting the coefficients of the corresponding variables to zero).
The contribution of each mechanism to the observed social and ethnic
segregation is finally appreciated by comparing the values of dissimilarity
indexes computed on the basis of the counterfactual households distributions
and on the observed households distribution. "Tiebout-sorting" emerges as the
primary cause of social segregation among wage-earning households. On the
contrary, "Alonso-sorting" appears to be the main driver of segregation
between economically active and inactive households, as well as between
Frenchcitizen and Foreign-citizen households. |