Length of stay in the host country and educational achievement of immigrant students: the Italian case

Using Italian data on language standardized tests for different levels of schooling we investigate 1) if the observed gap in educational attainments in first generation immigrants tends to lower the longer their stay in Italy and 2) if younger children tend to catch up faster than their older schoolmates. The analysis confirms the presence of a significant gap between natives and immigrants students in school outcomes for all grades, with first generation immigrants showing the largest gap. Further, the comparison between both first and second generation immigrant students and the results across the different grades suggest that the significant gap observed in the first generation is mainly due to the negative performance of immigrant children newly arrived in Italy and that interventions at younger ages are likely to be more effective. Finally, we find that also the immigrant students’ area of origin play a role in their schooling performance, suggesting that cultural differences affect children from different origins differently. We control for endogeneity concerns using both schools and classroom FE estimators, and results are robust to a specific sub-sample that controls for cheating, different model specifications and the use of math test scores as dependent variable.