Immigrant’s Fertility and Legal Status: the Role of the 2002 Italian Regularization reform

Donatella Lanari, University of Perugia
Luca Pieroni, Via della villa 8/c
Melcior Rossello Roig, University of Perugia
Luca Salmasi, Università Cattolica sede di Roma

In this paper, we examined whether the regularization law approved in Italy in 2002 led to changes in the fertility decision of immigrant women. We used two waves of the Birth Sample Survey, published by the Italian Institute of Statistics, to show that the Italian regularization law increased the probability of a woman having her first child by approximately 6 percentage points, whereas point estimates of the probability of having additional children beyond the first were not significant. By exploring alternative specifications and focusing on other individuals of the household eligible to receive the status of regular immigrant through employment, we find evidence of a significant and similar magnitude with respect to our baseline results. Robustness analyses confirmed our main findings.

Keywords: Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination, Population Policies, Fertility, Economic Demography

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