Le niveau de chômage dans le voisinage affecte-t-il l’entrée sur le marché du travail ?

Over the last decades, youth unemployment rate has remained high, and wide local variations have been observed in urban areas.?This article analyses the impact of the employment rate in the neighbourhood where individuals live on the integration of young entrants to the labour market.?To disentangle this social interaction effect from sorting, we propose a neighbourhood-fixed-effect strategy using very local variation of the employment rate. Using a representative sample of the young men leaving the French educational system in 1998 and 2004, we find a positive effect of the local level of employment on the probability to get a job three years after leaving school, suggesting the existence of interactions between new entrants and other workers in the neighbourhood.?The extent of the effect depends on the time spent in the neighbourhood by the new entrant to the labour market, her level of education and her immigrant origin.?This effect vanishes in areas where the employment rate is low : a marginal change in the local employment rate only increases chances to get a job for youth located in neighbourhoods where the initial rate is higher than 75%. Classification JEL : R23, Z13.