Labour Market Penalization and Segregation of Immigrants across Europe

The debate on ethnic penalty in the labour market, both in terms of employment status and occupational attainment, has been particularly intense in Europe in recent years (Kogan 2006; 2007; Heath, Cheung, 2007; Pichler, 2011; Reyneri and Fullin, 2011a; 2011b; Ballarino and Panichella, 2015; 2018). The analysis proposed have emphasized, alongside the microindividual dimension, the macro-institutional one, considering the national or supra-national level (welfare regimes, models of capitalism, regulation systems) as relevant in determining extent and characteristics of ethnic penalty. In particular, it can be traced two different models: in Central-Northern Europe immigrants suffer from a double penalty in comparison to natives, in terms of chances of being employed and having a good job; in Southern-European countries, instead, employment chances are similar between natives and immigrants, but the latter are still more penalized in terms of job quality. However, when adopting a territorial analysis approach, some studies show a high variability of the ethnic penalty model according to the local labour market structure (Avola 2015a; 2015b). In this perspective, this study aims at verifying the generalizability of these findings exploring the relevance of some characteristics of the labour market at regional level. We conduct the analysis on the Eurostat LFS, focusing on all EU regions (NUT2 level), and estimate a threelevel hierarchical multilevel model (Luke 2004) in order to detect to what extent the variance of ethnic penalty in terms of employment chance and job quality is due to the local context (labour market structural effect) or, following a comparative political economy approach (Esping-Andersen 1990; Ferrera 1996; Hall, Soskice, 2001; Burroni, 2016), it is linked to the national or supra-national level (macroinstitutional factors effect).