Chapelle, G., Gobillon, L., and Vignolles, B. (2017). Public housing development and segregation: SRU law in France. CEPR Working Paper
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We study the effects of the SRU law introduced in France in December 2000 to support scattered development of public housing in cities and favor social mixity. This law imposes 20% of public housing to all medium and large municipalities of large-enough cities, with fees for those not abiding by the law. Using exhaustive scal data, we evaluate the effects of the law over the 1996-2008 period using a difference-in-differences approach at the municipality level. We nd that the law stimulated public housing construction in treated municipalities with a low proportion of public dwellings. Within these municipalities, it decreased public housing segregation but it did not decrease much low-income segregation. We investigate intra-municipal dynamics by running block-level regressions that include municipality fixed effects. Within treated municipalities with a low proportion of public dwellings, public housing concentration increased to a larger extent in blocks with below-average income and below-average public housing concentration.
Chapelle, G. and Eyméoud, J.-B. and Wolf, Clara (2023). Land use regulation and the housing supply elasticity: evidence from France. mimeo
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This study gathered original data on French metropolitan statistical areas to estimate and decompose their inverse housing supply elasticity, describing how housing prices react to demand shocks. Our findings confirm that French cities are highly inelastic, with an estimated average supply elasticity of 0.5. Furthermore, leveraging a nationwide regulation protecting historical monuments as an instrument, we found that land-use regulations controlled by local authorities appear to be mainly responsible for this low supply elasticity.
Bruneel, C. Chapelle, G. and Eyméoud, J.-B. and Wasmer, Etienne (2023). Housing prices propagation: A theory of spatial interaction. mimeo
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A puzzle is that price-to-rent ratios in the housing market vary a lot in time and space, even after accounting for differences in local discount rates or rent growth differences. We propose a variant of asset pricing equations for housing markets that include a price gradient in space. It is analogous to the transport equation in physics and generates a new range of solutions consistent with the facts. The rationale for the price gradient in the asset pricing equation it is the existence of spatial search frictions for housing. It is supported by the data analysis of a large urban area, Paris region.
Chapelle, G. (2017). Does social housing crowd out private construction?
This paper provides new evidence on the impact of subsidized housing programs when access to developable land is strictly regulated. I study the impact of social housing in France, which represents about 1% of the French GDP in yearly subsidy. Specifically, I use the fact that subsidized programs are twice less dense than private projects in similar areas to test whether access to developable land explains the crowding out effect of private starts by public starts. Exploiting a a national law forcing some municipalities to build more social dwellings as a natural experiment in a Regression-in-Discontinuity framework , I find that one social dwelling crowds out about two private units which is proportional to the relative density of both sectors. This effect is robust with alternate instrumental variables and disappears when the share of land developed is low. This result sheds a new light on the way to think about place based policies when the land supply is inelastic which is the case in most of the major cities where these programs are used as Paris, London or New York.
Chapelle, G., Ubeda M (2025). Competing for opportunity : Transport infrastructures and localized unemployment (revisions requested at Economic Journal)
Slides / Paper
Unemployment rates vary significantly across neighborhoods, yet the role of transport infrastructures in explaining these disparities remains relatively unexplored. Building on evidence that highlights persistent disparities despite significant reductions in transport times and the relative proximity of unemployed to jobs, we propose a novel quantitative urban model with frictional unemployment and heterogeneous workers. In this framework, better connections between neighborhoods might exacerbate unemployment disparities due to competition among workers with different productivity levels. We document this phenomenon using a difference-in-differences panel approach to estimate the impact of the creation of the Paris Regional Express Rail (RER). We find that the project increased the unemployment rate of low-skilled workers. Finally, we decompose the employment gap between skill groups. We find that, in Paris, differences in job market access actually reduce unemployment inequalities between college graduates and the rest of the population.