What is the influence of immigrant background on educational transitions? Primary and secondary effects on school choice in Italian upper secondary education

This paper adds to the growing literature on primary and secondary effects of immigrant background on educational transitions by providing evidence on the Italian case. We analyze transitions to upper secondary education exploiting unique administrative data from the province of Trento in Northeast Italy and appying the method developed by Karlson and Holm (2011) to decompose logistic regression coefficients. Consistently with most empirical studies carried out in other Western countries, primary effects are found to play a major role in determining immigrant-native differences in educational transitions. Immigrant-native differences in academic track enrolment are largely accounted for by differences in prior performance. In addition to most studies, we focus not only on the academic but also on the vocational track. In relation to this specific transition, immigrant background secondary effects are detected, with first-generation immigrants still displaying significantly higher risk of enrolling in the vocational track even controlling for prior performance and social background.