Diversity and Employment Prospects: Neighbors Matter!

Using recent data from the French Labor Force Survey, this paper explores how diversity affects individuals’ employment prospects at various geographic levels. Employment correlates positively with local labor market diversity, but negatively with neighborhood diversity. Using several approaches to deal with the endogeneity of local labor market diversity, we do not find any robust evidence of a causal impact of diversity on employment at this rather aggregate level, suggesting that immigrants actually tend to self-select into more economically dynamic areas. However, taking advantage of the very precise localization of the data in order to correct biases related to residential sorting, we confirm a negative effect of neighborhood diversity. We also show that diversity in terms of nationalities matters more than diversity based on parents’ origins, giving insights on the underlying mechanisms.