Camille Hémet

The choice between vocational and academic education at the end of secondary school has important long-run effects, and is made at an age where peers’ influence might be paramount. In this paper, we investigate the effect of neighbors’ track choices on 9th graders choices at the end of lower secondary education, in Paris. This question is central to understand the extent to which residential segregation can reinforce social segregation across vocational and academic tracks. We rely on neighbors from the preceding cohort in order to bypass the reflection problem, and use within-catchment-area variation in distance between pairs of students to account for residential sorting. We use a pair-wise model that enables us to carefully study the role of distance between neighbors, and to perform detailed heterogeneity analysis. Our results suggest that close neighbors do influence track choices at the end of 9th grade, particularly for pupils pursuing a vocational track. This effect is driven by neighbors living in the same building, and is larger for pairs of boys and for pairs of pupils from low social background. Overall, our results suggest that neighbor effects tend to accentuate social segregation across high school tracks.

This paper examines the impact of ethnic fractionalization on public service use by exploiting a major constitutional reform in Kenya. Following an important period of inter-ethnic conflict, responsibility for local health services was decentralized to 47 newly created county governments. Crucially, this changed the ethnic composition of the administrative area responsible for healthcare, while leaving the composition of the local population unchanged. Using an event-study design, we find that use of public clinics for births increased significantly after the reform, but only in counties that were relatively ethnically homogeneous. We also find a significant increase in the correlation between county ethnic fractionalization and a range of other measures of public health service use. Using within-county variation to investigate mechanisms, we find healthcare use increases were concentrated among individuals of the same ethnicity as members of the new county government executives. Overall, the results suggest that more ethnically homogeneous sub-national jurisdictions can rapidly increase public service use.

We study the relative impact of custodial and non-custodial sentences on later crime and labor-market outcomes in Denmark, a country where detention conditions are particularly good. To do so, we take advantage of a large-scale reform of the Danish legislation implemented in 2000, whereby incarceration was replaced by a non-custodial sentence for most drunk-driving crimes, which represented a quarter of the custodial sentences inflicted prior to the reform. Our first key finding is that stakeholders anticipated the consequences of the reform: around the time of the reform, the number of cases tried dropped and the nature of the cases changed significantly. To measure the relative impact of incarceration, we therefore resort to a novel instrumental variable approach exploiting quasi-exogenous variation in the probability of being tried after the reform, and therefore incarcerated, based on the crime date. We find that incarcerated offenders commit more crimes and have weaker ties to the labor market after release. The pattern of results suggests that part of the explanation for this increase in offenders’ criminal activities can be found in their greater precariousness.

We study the relative impact of custodial and non-custodial sentences on later crime and labor-market outcomes in Denmark, a country where detention conditions are particularly good. To do so, we take advantage of a large-scale reform of the Danish legislation implemented in 2000, whereby incarceration was replaced by a non-custodial sentence for most drunk-driving crimes, which represented a quarter of the custodial sentences inflicted prior to the reform. Our first key finding is that stakeholders anticipated the consequences of the reform: around the time of the reform, the number of cases tried dropped and the nature of the cases changed significantly. To measure the relative impact of incarceration, we therefore resort to a novel instrumental variable approach exploiting quasi-exogenous variation in the probability of being tried after the reform, and therefore incarcerated, based on the crime date. We find that incarcerated offenders commit more crimes and have weaker ties to the labor market after release. The pattern of results suggests that part of the explanation for this increase in offenders’ criminal activities can be found in their greater precariousness.