Measuring discrimination in the labor market.

Summary This thesis consists of four articles, mainly empirical, on discrimination in the labor market. The first article focuses on the employment and wages of French people of North African origin, the second on their wages and access to managerial status, the third on the heterogeneity of their employment gaps, and the fourth uses data from a test designed to measure the impact of a prison background on access to employment in the United States. The added value of these articles is twofold. First, they provide new empirical evidence on the labor market situation of French people of foreign origin: employment and wage gaps with the reference population are high, but once differences between populations (age, education, etc.) are taken into account, most of the wage gaps disappear. On the contrary, a substantial part of the differences in employment and in the proportion of managers remains. Moreover, we propose an original description of the heterogeneity of employment gaps which shows that these gaps are relatively large for individuals whose employment rates would be the lowest in the reference population, while for those whose theoretical employment rates are higher these unexplained gaps are much smaller. Second, these articles provide methodological elements for measuring discrimination. The first three articles attempt to incorporate ideas and notations used in the public policy evaluation literature. The fourth attempts to shed light on the methods usually used in testing studies.