The 2005 French Urban Unrests: Data-Based Interpretations

The French 2005 riots in the urban outskirts were the most numerous, widespread and violent France has experienced since the beginning of the 1980s. In The Politics of Collective Violence, Charles Tilly refused the term ‘riot as a scientific idiom’ because it embodies a political judgment rather than an analytical distinction. Authorities and observers label as riots the damage‐going gatherings of which they disapprove, but they use terms like demonstrations, protest, resistance or retaliation for essentially similar events of which they approve (2003, 18). Our aim here is to discuss this assertion. How far is violence an act of protest? How far can the authors of collective violence acting in the French deprived urban areas in November 2005 be described as ‘rioters’ or rebels? The following contribution mainly focuses on empirical data (quantitative and qualitative) in order to fulfil this aim. We will leave the root causes and contextual aspects by one side (economic deprivation, urban segregation, conflicts with police forces, etc.) and concentrate on immediate data produced in the wake of the riots, in the little research produced afterwards.     

Equilibrium Wage Dispersion with Worker and Employer Heterogeneity

We construct and estimate an equilibrium search model with on–the–job–search. Firms make take–it–or–leave–it wage offers to workers conditional on their characteristics and they can respond to the outside job offers received by their employees. Unobserved worker productive heterogeneity is introduced in the form of cross–worker differences in a “competence” parameter. On the other side of the market, firms also are heterogeneous with respect to their marginal productivity of labor. The model delivers a theory of steady–state wage dispersion driven by heterogenous worker abilities and firm productivities, as well as by matching frictions. The structural model is estimated using matched employer and employee French panel data. The exogenous distributions of worker and firm heterogeneity components are nonparametrically estimated. We use this structural estimation to provide a decomposition of cross–employee wage variance. We find that the share of the cross–sectional wage variance that is explained by person effects varies across skill groups. Specifically, this share lies close to 40% for high–skilled white collars, and quickly decreases to 0% as the observed skill level decreases. The contribution of market imperfections to wage dispersion is typically around 50%.