We investigate the educational choices of first- and second-generation immigrant students at the transition between lower-secondary school and high school by exploiting a large longitudinal dataset of about 50,000 students in Italy. We find that immigrant students are less likely to choose challenging academic track high schools compared with their Italian counterparts, after controlling for household characteristics, school fixed effects, and students’ performance. We show that systematic differences in teachers’ feedback received by the two groups of students are an important driver of the observed differences in educational choices by immigrant and native students. In addition, after controlling for observable characteristics, we find that immigrant students are more likely to be formally advised by their teachers to choose vocational or technical high schools rather than academic tracks, especially in the case of female students, reflecting a discrimination bias that has not previously been emphasized in the literature. This suggests the role for a new dimension of policy intervention aimed at reducing the possibility of teachers’ induced discrimination based on implicit stereotypes.

No abstract

We study how receiving credit from a social bank (Banca Prossima), created in 2008, has affected the economic performance of social enterprises in Italy in the following years. Social enterprises are key providers of welfare services in the country, but due to their legal status as not-for-profit organizations they have difficulty raising capital. Consequently, their growth is often very slow. Credit could replace capital, but not-for-profit organizations are often subject to credit constraints. Moreover, given that they cannot choose the optimal combination of credit and capital, the effect of credit on the economic performance of social enterprises is far from clear. We use a proprietary data set and a difference-in-differences approach to compare social enterprises that received credit from the social bank and those that did not receive it. The results suggest that receivers significantly increase their production, fixed assets, properties, and employment when they have access to new credit. The results are robust to several tests and an alternative identification strategy that combines matching and difference-in-differences methods.

We show that board gender quota laws reduce the propensity of French firms to undertake outward foreign direct investment. For this, we use firm‐level data for the period 2007 to 2015 and a difference‐in‐difference approach. The exogenous increase in the share of women directors decreases the share of foreign subsidiaries by 7 percentage points when the share of women directors is at its highest. The share of foreign subsidiaries is affected by the decrease in probability of having a foreign subsidiary, which indicates disinvestment. The effects on outward foreign direct investment we detect are strongest for the poorly managed firms, pointing to tough managerial monitoring by gender diverse boards as the driving force behind results.

This paper investigates the dispersions in days worked and wages by adapting a novel semi-parametric specification that minimizes assumptions about life-cycle labor income dynamics. Data for Italy shows a substantial increase in income inequality after age 50 for males over the time span from 1985 to 2012, which is remarkably driven by the variations in days worked rather than wages. Results show that this increase is determined by permanent changes in the number of days worked. I also introduce an empirical strategy to decompose the cross-covariances of wages and working days to quantify the permanent and transitory responses of days worked to wage shocks. A one-percent increase in permanent wages increases the permanent days worked by 0.8% at the age of 28, while this increase is about 0.3% at the age of 55. Despite the strong reaction of days of work to wage shocks early in careers, the correlation coefficients are small, indicating that only a small share of variation in permanent days worked -which shapes the permanent income inequality -is explained by the changes in wages.