Income segregation and suburbanization in France: a discrete choice approach

National audienceThis paper focuses on residential sorting by social and ethnic status in large French urban areas. Three major determinants of segregation are stressed in the economic literature (i) Alonso sorting based on distance, due to the trade-off between land consumption and accessibility to the central city, (ii) sorting based on local households’ income, due to the taste for endogenous amenities produced by residents’ income and (iii) Tiebout sorting over jurisdictions, due to the taste for local public goods. The last two mechanisms result in an interjurisdictional sorting according to jurisdiction’s average household income, while the first one leads to a radioconcentric sorting. Our objective is to assess the relative importance of these two types of sorting. 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 jurisdictions’ distance to the central city and jurisdictions’ mean household income (as a proxy for the level of endogenous amenities and local public goods). Second, our estimation results are used to simulate the counterfactual residential patterns that would prevail if, alternatively, one or the other of these segregation channels were inactive. The contribution of the two types of sorting to the social and ethnic segregation is finally appreciated by comparing the values of dissimilarity indexes computed on the basis of the observed and counterfactual residential distributions of households. Interjurisdictional sorting based on income emerges as the primary cause of social segregation among wage-earning households. On the contrary, Alonso-type sorting appears to be the main driver of segregation between economically active and inactive households, as well as between French-citizen and Foreign-citizen households