Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0 Author-Name: Koray Aktas Author-X-Name-First: Koray Author-X-Name-Last: Aktas Author-Name: Gianluca Argentin Author-X-Name-First: Gianluca Author-X-Name-Last: Argentin Author-Name: Gian Paolo Barbetta Author-X-Name-First: Gian Paolo Author-X-Name-Last: Barbetta Author-Email: gianpaolo.barbetta@unicatt.it Author-Workplace-Name: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Author-Workplace-Name: Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Author-Name: Gianna Barbieri Author-X-Name-First: Gianna Author-X-Name-Last: Barbieri Author-Name: Luca Vittorio Angelo Colombo Author-X-Name-First: Luca Vittorio Angelo Author-X-Name-Last: Colombo Author-Email: lucava.colombo@unicatt.it Author-Workplace-Name: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Author-Workplace-Name: Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Title: High School Choices by Immigrant Students in Italy: Evidence from Administrative Data. Abstract: We investigate the educational choices of first- and second-generation immigrant students at the transition between lower-secondary school and high school by exploiting a large longitudinal dataset of about 50,000 students in Italy. We find that immigrant students are less likely to choose challenging academic track high schools compared with their Italian counterparts, after controlling for household characteristics, school fixed e ects, and students' performance. We show that systematic di erences in teachers' evaluations received by the two groups of students are an important driver of the observed di erences in educational choices by immigrant and native students. In particular, after controlling for observable characteristics, we find that immigrant students are more likely to be formally advised by their teachers to choose vocational or technical high schools rather than academic tracks, re ecting a discrimination bias that has not previously been emphasized in the literature. This suggests the role of a new dimension of policy intervention aimed at reducing the possibility of teachers' induced discrimination based on implicit stereotypes. Length: 43 Creation-Date: 2021-07 File-URL: http://dipartimenti.unicatt.it/economia-finanza-def108.pdf File-Format: Application/pdf File-Function: First version, 2021 Number: def108 Classification-JEL: I21, I24, I26, I28. Keywords: immigrant students, high school choice, academic track, discrimination biases, implicit stereotypes. Handle: RePEc:ctc:serie1:def108