Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/295477 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
CReAM Discussion Paper Series No. 11/14
Publisher: 
Centre for Research & Analysis of Migration (CReAM), Department of Economics, University College London, London
Abstract: 
This paper aims to isolate the ethnic gap on the labor market that can be attributed to ethnicity and not to differences in individual characteristics or residential location. Controlling for residential location is important as ethnic minorities often live in distressed neighborhoods. It is also challenging because spatial sorting is likely to differ across ethnicities because of labor-or housing-market discrimination. This paper shows that controlling for neighborhoods and observed individual characteristics fails to provide a consistent estimate for the component of the gap accountable to ethnicity only. However, under some assumptions, the quantity of interest is set identified even when heterogeneous sorting patterns across ethnicities are allowed for and the set estimate can still be informative. A two-step estimation method is presented and applied to explain the ethnic employment differential in France, between French individuals of North African ancestry and those with non-immigrant parents. Most of the gap is not due to differences in residential location or individual characteristics, but rather to ethnicity itself.
Subjects: 
ethnic employment gaps
spatial sorting
discrimination
spatial mismatch
JEL: 
C23
J71
R23
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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