Skills or culture? An analysis of the decision to work by immigrant women in Italy

Antonio Accetturo and Luigi Infante

No 815, Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: Activity and employment rates for immigrant women in many industrialized countries display a great variability across national groups. The aim of this paper is to assess whether this well-known fact is due to a voluntary decision (i.e. large reservation wages by the immigrants) or to an involuntary process in that the labour market evaluation of their skills is low. This is done by estimating the reservation wages for each individual in the dataset. Our results show that low activity and employment rates for certain national groups are not associated with high reservation wages. This implies that low participation should not be interpreted as a voluntary decision.

Keywords: Reservation wages; female labour supply; cross-national differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J22 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hme, nep-lab and nep-mig
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Journal Article: Skills or culture? An analysis of the decision to work by immigrant women in Italy (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_815_11

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