Abstract for the ‘Opening the Pandora’s Box: Gender and Migration in Italy’

This research aims to contribute to the literature on migrants’ entrepreneurship by investigating the determinants of self-employment for migrants in Italy using a dataset propriety of the National Observatory for the Financial Inclusion of Migrants in Italy, managed by CeSPI. Controlling for the macroeconomic context, we find out that the main determinants of migrant entrepreneurship in Italy are related to their nationality, the length of stay, the gender, the proximity of partner and the city of residence. Moreover, our data show that, for men, the decision of starting a business is taken because of opportunity and not trough necessity and that being married is a determinant of entrepreneurship only for women. Furthermore, we verify that the causal relation between being more prone to risk and being an entrepreneur holds true also in the case of migrant entrepreneurs in Italy.