How Important Discrimination is for the Job Satisfaction of Immigrants in Italy: A Counterfactual Approach

In this study we aim to evaluate how the status of citizenship, for the immigrants in Italy, influences their job satisfaction and perception of well-being. To this end, analysing the Eusilc-Italy data, we try to disentangle the effect of discrimination due to the citizenship status from the effect of the individual skills and socio-demographic characteristics on the individual job satisfaction and life satisfaction. To this end we follow a counterfactual approach by applying the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. As a result, we found that individual skills determine differences in earning work income between immigrants and natives, but do not significantly explain the different perception of well-being and job satisfaction, probably due to a discrimination effect.