Nonexpected discrimination: the case of social housing in France

Abstract

This research is a study of the differences in duration of waiting time between European and non-European households to obtain social housing, drawing on the housing survey carried out by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE, Paris, 2006). The idea here is to bring to light eventual discrimination against non-European households. We show that these households, all else held constant, spend more time on the waiting lists. Appropriate decomposition techniques enable us to demonstrate that a nonnegligible portion of this gap could well be due to discrimination.

Keywords:

• social housing
• waiting list
• European and non-European households
• social criteria
• discrimination

JEL Classification:

• H31
• D12
• R20

Notes

¹ The principal countries concerned by migration to France are the African and Asiatic countries, plus Turkey. Estimation of the model that includes these various ethnic origins presented in Table 1 shows the pertinence of this regrouping. This estimation is available from the authors on request.

² The index i is ignored to simplify the notation.

³ A dummy variable has been introduced in the estimation, Tables 3a–c.

⁴ The non-European counterfactual yields the lower bound of the unexplained part, while the European counterfactual gives the upper bound. All linear combinations of two sets of parameters indicate an unexplained share that is included in this interval (Cotton, 1988; Fortin et al., 2010).

⁵ The measurement of this unexplained part depends on the explanatory variables used in the model. The introduction of supplementary explanatory variables that are not available in the database could eventually modify this unexplained share.