Birds of a feather cannot always flock together: essays on the socio-economic impacts of local diversity

Qui se ressemble ne s'assemble pas toujours: essais sur les effets socio-économiques de la diversité locale

Camille Hemet

SciencePo Working papers Main from HAL

Abstract: Diversity reflects the extent to which members of a given community share different characteristics, usually pertaining to ethnicity, socio-economic status or even culture. As a result of trade development and economic integration, modern societies have to cope with increasing levels of diversity, both in terms of origins and social statuses. The purpose of this dissertation is to assess the social and economic impacts of local diversity. More precisely, this thesis shows how neighborhood level diversity affects individuals' living conditions and employment prospects. This work contributes to the existing literature in three ways: it examines unexplored issues at a very local level, gives new insights about the underlying mechanisms and provides new methods to address the endogeneity issue. Chapter 1 shows that diversity in terms of origins has a negative effect on the quality of local public goods, due to vandalism, not deterred by social policing, and due to collective action failure to ensure effective property management. However, it has no robust effect on public safety. Chapter 2 reveals that the effect of unemployment on crime has a spatial dimension: for economic crimes the effect of unemployment rate in surrounding neighborhoods is stronger than that of the immediate neighborhood, while the reverse holds for vandalism. Chapter 3 shows that people living in a diverse neighborhood face lower employment prospects, but that this effect is more related to cultural (e.g. language) diversity than to ethnic diversity. Chapter 4 develops a model rationalizing the fact that ethnic minorities turn to the informal economy in response to adverse labor market conditions.

Keywords: Ethnic and cultural diversity; Living conditions; Social relationships; Unemployment; Diversité ethnique et culturelle; Conditions de vie; Relations sociales; Chômage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11-20
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://theses.hal.science/tel-03522695v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Economics and Finance. Institut d'études politiques de paris - Sciences Po, 2013. English. ⟨NNT : 2013IEPP0041⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://theses.hal.science/tel-03522695v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:spmain:tel-03522695

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SciencePo Working papers Main from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Contact - Sciences Po Departement of Economics ().