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To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2007.02079.x Byline: Dominique Goux (1), Eric Maurin (2) Abstract: Children's outcomes are strongly correlated with those of their neighbours. The extent to which this is causal is the subject of an extensive literature. There is an identification problem because people with similar characteristics are observed to live in close proximity. Another major difficulty is that neighbourhoods measured in available data are often considerably larger than those which matter for outcomes (i.e. close neighbours). Several institutional features of France enable us to address these problems. We find that an adolescent's outcomes at the end of junior high-school are strongly influenced by the performance of other adolescents in the neighbourhood. Author Affiliation: (1)INSEE, ENS (2)PSE, CEPR, IZA Article History: Submitted: 13 May 2005 Accepted: 28 September 2006

Using sex composition of the siblings as instrumental variables, a study of the effect of living in overcrowded dwellings on the performance at school is critically examined. The results indicate that children living in less crowded homes tend to perform much better in schools than children living in overcrowded homes.

The evolution of the 'post-Fordist' economy is alleged to have changed the structure of work careers in the American work force of the 1990s. Analysis suggest that observed trends in the returns to job tenure and experience arise from real changes in the production of value rather than from selection mechanisms linked to post-Fordist-induced trends in the structure of job mobility.

We estimate a model of labour demand that accounts for dynamics arising from the relative costs of hiring and firing workers on either indefinite-term contract (TTC) or fixed-term contract (FTC). We use a panel of 1000 French firms, for which we can measure the number of entries and exits for each type of contract between 1988 and 1992. Our estimates suggest that (1) it is much more costly to lay offworkers under ITC than to hire them; (2) it is much less costly to adjust the number of FTC than to adjust the number of FTC; (3) the asymmetry between hiring and lay off costs is more important for non-production than for production workers. [C] 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: J23; J30; D21 Keywords: Fixed-term contracts; Adjustment costs; Dynamic labour demand, We estimate a model of labour demand that accounts for dynamics arising from the relative costs of hiring and firing workers on either indefinite-term contract (TTC) or fixed-term contract (FTC). We use a panel of 1000 French firms, for which we can measure the number of entries and exits for each type of contract between 1988 and 1992. Our estimates suggest that (1) it is much more costly to lay offworkers under ITC than to hire them; (2) it is much less costly to adjust the number of FTC than to adjust the number of FTC; (3) the asymmetry between hiring and lay off costs is more important for non-production than for production workers. [C] 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: J23; J30; D21 Keywords: Fixed-term contracts; Adjustment costs; Dynamic labour demand

The decline in the unskilled share of French employment is chiefly due to the slackness of domestic demand for those industries with the highest proportion of unskilled workers. The spread of computers has not been particularly conducive to substitution between skilled and unskilled labor. We test and accept the hypothesis of technical-progress neutrality within French industries. The mechanisms that generate inequality do not appear to be the same in France and in the United States. The source of inequality isn't so much technical progress per se as its interaction with the institutions that regulate the labor market., I. Introduction PERHAPS one of the most worrying trends in the most-advanced western economies is the ever-deeper inequality created by the labor market. In countries that do not apply automatic [...]

We estimate interindustry wage differentials using new French longitudinal data that allow a tracking of workers and their firms over time. We find that, when measured on a cross-sectional basis, they primarily reflect the interindustry variations in unmeasured labor quality. However, interindustry wage differentials are only a minor component of interfirm wage differentials. The average differential in wages paid to the same workers by different firms is about 20%30%. In a given industry, wage policies are more favorable to workers in large, capital-intensive firms., The author's central focus is that inter-industry wage differentials frequently reflect inter-industry changes in unmeasured labor quality. Also, although there is not a strong relationship between a company's average labor quality and its wage policy, employees are inclined to spend their careers in companies with similar wage policies.