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Wages and employment of French workers with African origin

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Abstract

Our study focuses on the differences in wages and employment between French workers with French parents and French workers with at least one African parent, using the Formation Qualification Professionnelle survey (Insee, Paris, 2003). We introduce econometric decompositions, which allow us to reach conclusions when the potentially discriminated group is small. Then, we clarify the impact of discrimination at the hiring level in this context. We find that unexplained parts in the employment decompositions are much larger than in the wage decompositions. This suggests that, in France, labor market discrimination is more frequent at the hiring level than in the compensation process.

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Acknowledgements

All correspondence to Roland Rathelot. The authors thank Jim Albrecht, Manon Domingues dos Santos, Guy Laroque, David Neumark, Sébastien Roux, Patrick Simon, François-Charles Wolff, and two anonymous referees for helpful discussions and remarks. Participants at Alliance Conference on Group Inequality and Discrimination (Columbia University, May 2005), INSEE Research Seminar (Paris, June 2005), Soccult Workshop (Paris, February 2006), INED Seminar (Paris, May 2006), MIRE Seminar (Paris, October 2006), JMA Conference (Fribourg, June 2007), EALE Conference (Budapest, August 2007), EEA Conference (Oslo, September 2007), TEPP Conference (Evry-sur-Seine, December 2007), and at the 2nd IZA Migration Topic Week (Bonn, May 2008) provided useful comments. All the remaining errors are ours.

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Correspondence to Roland Rathelot.

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Responsible editor: James Albrecht

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Aeberhardt, R., Fougère, D., Pouget, J. et al. Wages and employment of French workers with African origin. J Popul Econ 23, 881–905 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-009-0266-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-009-0266-3

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