This paper demonstrates that unpaid rent risk deters landlords from supplying housing services to fragile renters; and that insuring owners against it improves the upward geographic mobility of constrained tenants to expensive, high-wage neighborhoods. We show theoretically that subsidizing rental insurance can improve efficiency by reducing the spatial misallocation of tenants. We test this prediction by studying the implementation of Visale, a publicly funded nationwide rent guarantee insurance policy in France, free of charge to eligible tenants and landlords. We exploit exhaustive registry information on all French households, data on the universe of Visale beneficiaries and claim payouts, and quasi-experimental eligibility variation across renters. We demonstrate that the non-payment guarantee increased access to private-sector rental housing for eligible tenants. The effects are stronger for immigrants, newly formed households, and those with low incomes, who often do not satisfy landlords’ standard screening criteria. By providing ex ante insurance, the scheme eased the long-distance spatial mobility of low-income renters towards higher-wage, higher-rent neighborhoods, at a moderate fiscal cost per marginal move.

To make flood insurance affordable, several countries subsidize premiums in high-risk areas. This paper examines the effects of the French flood insurance policy, one of the most heavily subsidized systems, which mandates coverage and requires all households to pay premiums not indexed to risk exposure. Using fine-grained data on dwellings along the French-Belgian border, I analyze the 1982 implementation of this system and find a large increase in new construction in flood-prone areas, raising total flood costs by 1.5% since 1982. Despite these behavioral responses, subsidies may still benefit mobility-constrained households in high-risk areas. Using the reduced-form estimates, I calibrate a location choice model along with a social insurance framework to recover optimal subsidies. I also simulate how complementing subsidies with policies like land-use regulation and taxes on new constructions in flood-prone areas could enhance welfare. This study provides policymakers with new estimates and counterfactual policy options for offering flood insurance coverage.

This paper examines how natural disaster risks are distributed across tenants, owner-occupants, and owners of rental, second, and vacant homes. Using dwelling-level data covering the entire French housing stock, I document large disparities in exposure to flooding and subsidence. Prior studies, relying on aggregate income data and focusing only on residents, typically find that low-income households are more exposed to flooding. However, this approach overlooks half of the exposed housing stock, owned by non-residents. Once these properties are included, flood risk appears concentrated among wealthy second-home owners, while subsidence mainly affects single-property homeowners. These ownership patterns have important policy implications. First, untargeted flood insurance subsidies tend to benefit second-home owners, whereas subsidence coverage mainly supports owner-occupants. Second, using a new approach to estimate risk discounts, I show that natural disaster risks are not priced into properties owned by absentee landlords, driving 13% to 25% of the total overvaluation in flood-prone areas. Finally, place-based adaptation policies such as building resilient defenses may fail to target the most critical areas if ownership structures are ignored.

Landlords and tenants, on average, have opposite characteristics; but they display positive assortative matching within rental markets. In a nationwide data set containing administrative information on linked renter-occupiers and owners of investment properties for 4.5 million private rental dwellings in France, we document assortative matching by income level and composition, wealth, age, marital status and family structure, both across and within fine geographic segments. Consistent with a novel theory of rental housing assignment, the income correlation is only partially explained by observable characteristics such as location, size, or investment timing. It is mediated through high-wealth landlords listing higher-rent units occupied by high-income tenants, partly thanks to the filtering of the housing stock from past owner-occupiers to current renters. This pattern has quantitatively substantial implications for the measurement of returns to wealth, and the incidence of housing market policies, such as means-tested subsidies.

This article examines the difficulties anticipated by companies in France when it comes to recruiting staff. We match data from the 2018 and 2019 Besoins en Main‑d’Œuvre surveys on workforce needs with company data from the FARE annual structural statistics of companies from the ESANE scheme and the DADS (Déclaration annuelle de données sociales – Annual Declaration of Social Data) to examine how recruitment difficulties are distributed by sector, location and size of the establishment and employment area characteristics. Together, these factors explain around 6% of the total variation in recruitment challenges, increasing to 14% when incorporating recruitment difficulties reported in the previous year. Most of the recruitment difficulties anticipated thus result from factors not observed in the data used in this article, potentially linked to the internal characteristics of each establishment, such as the quality of management and specific recruitment processes.

In many parts of the world the costs of flooding are projected to rise sharply due to climate change and urbanization in flood-prone areas. This study compares the rate of construction in high-risk zones across France and the UK, and discusses the impact of insurance and urban planning policies. In both France and the U.K., the housing stock in flood-prone areas keeps growing substantially every year, and new construction in flood risk areas has not shown any sizeable sign of slowing down in recent years. In France, second homes are overrepresented in flood-risk zones, contrasting with the U.K. Both countries show higher rates in low-income neighbourhoods, raising concerns about the emergence of socially deprived areas at high risk of flooding that may not have access to insurance, sometimes called “flood ghettos.”. While insurance is subsidized in both countries, a key distinction is that new build homes at risk do not benefit from subsidized rates in the U.K., whereas they do in France. However, this difference does not appear to substantially deter construction in risky areas in the U.K. compared to France. These findings highlight challenges in balancing risk reduction, affordability, and sustainable development.