Immigration and female entrepreneurship in the Lombardy region: can the presence of low-skilled immigrants, who provide home and children care services, improve the chances of survival of the female-led innovative startups?

This thesis has the scope to check if the level of low-skilled immigrants presents in the specific area of the Italian region of Lombardy has an effect on the survival’s probability of the female-led startups founded in that area, starting from the idea that the low-skilled immigrants can provide house and children care services and permits the women entrepreneurs to dedicate more time to their business. The first stage provides the study of the prior literature about the factors that can influence the startup’s probability of survival, to find all variables, different from the level of immigrants, which must be considered in the statistical model’s construction, with a specific focus on the factors related to the gender’s difference in the entrepreneurial world. Secondly, the statistical model is constructed, first of all the data are collected from two different databases, the Innovative Startup Register linked to AIDA, that provides the information about the startups founded on the Lombardy’s territory , and the database downloaded from ISTAT, that provides the level of immigrants in each Lombardy’s municipality, in particular it is taken in consideration the level of women aged between 25 and 65 with a nationality different from the Italian’s one. All these information are used in the construction of the linear regression that has the duration of the startup as dependent variable and the level of immigration as independent variable, and other information about the startup are used as control variables. Different variants of the first basic linear regression are carried out to increase the level of fit of the model and to analyze the problem from different points of view.