Spatial and linguistic mismatches in urban and low-skilled labour markets

Job seekers experience a number of barriers that hinder them in finding suitable jobs. Our research focuses on two of those: spatial and linguistic mismatches. There has already been extensive research on the importance of a spatial mismatch in the process of job searching, essentially stating that job seekers do not live close to the vacancies that suit them, a problem that is often exacerbated by a lack of mobility. On the other hand, linguistic mismatches have not gotten much attention, even though international organisations such as the OECD have been stressing the importance of language in the labour market. While education is a barrier in its own right, we will mainly focus on the low-skilled job seekers, a part of the population for whom the other barriers could play an even more important role, for example through a lower mobility compared to high-skilled job seekers. This project focuses on the Brussels-Capital Region market, a region that combines very high unemployment (especially for the low-skilled population) with a high labour demand and a considerable amount of vacancies that seem to be difficult to fill. The region is well-suited to study the role of language, given the importance of French as the lingua franca for the largest part of the population, while vacancies often demand a certain knowledge of Dutch as well, especially those in the Flemish hinterland. For this research, we have access to a unique administrative database, containing data on the full population of job seekers registered in the Brussels-Capital region at the start of 2012, with highly detailed geographical data, and another containing all the vacancies that were registered during the same year. Using these databases we will try to measure the different forms of mismatches and their impact on the chances of job seekers on the labour market. In the second part of the project we look at domestic workers, a sector that is heavily subsidized through the use of service vouchers, creating a large number of vacancies for the low-skilled population. The focal point here is a choice experiment to measure the stated preference of families who are asked to choose between different profiles of domestic workers, through which we can measure the importance of language, price etc.

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