Measurement of segregation in the labour market. An alternative approach.

In the last years different comparative studies have shown that foreigners in Italy experience difficulties in entering regular and skilled jobs, whereas have fairly easy access to irregular, unskilled and semi-skilled jobs, with no chances of a future upward promotion. It was showed that ethnicization and specialization processes lead to occupational segregation in specific sectors of the economy for many different foreign community. In this job we want to estimate level of segregation of foreign workers vs italians, using data of RCFL of ISTAT for the years 2007 and 2010. Usually the level of segregation is measured by index of dissimilarity (ID) or others measures. As recently shown in literature these measures tend to over-estimate segregation in small groups, while this bias decreases according to increasing the dimension of groups. In this job we apply an alternative method to measure the segregation based on a multilevel approach that permit us to consider time and spatial effects and can adjust and explain differences for characteristics of the individuals. This alternative approach is based on a simulation method according to the estimated segregation parameters are expression of any desired n-groups segregation indexes.