The impact of housing costs on labor market trajectories

Marie Aurélie Lapierre, Ghizlen Ouasbaa Azzouani

2024

Abstract

This article aims to assess the consequences of high housing costs on labor market disparities between high-skilled and low-skilled workers, with the aim of shedding light on the issue of the affordable housing deficit. We implement an inter-city analysis in which we compare differences in outcomes between high-skilled and low-skilled based on intra-city mechanisms in line with urban labor models (Zenou, 2009). We use French administrative data to follow the labor market trajectories of employees over the period 2010-2018, and precise data on housing costs. We focus for now on two outcomes: the stability of the contract and the probability of promotions. At the empirical level, an instrumental variable technique is deployed to cope with the endogeneity between the housing and the labor market, while a 'two-step approach' is used to control for the non-random spatial sorting of individuals across cities.