David A. Jaeger () (College of William and Mary and IZA) Holger Bonin (IZA and DIW) Thomas Dohmen (IZA and DIW) Armin Falk (University of Bonn, IZA, CEPR, and DIW) David Huffman (IZA) Uwe Sunde (IZA, University of Bonn, CEPR, and DIW)
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Geographic mobility is important for the functioning of labor markets because it brings labor resources to where they can be most efficiently used. It has long been hypothesized that individuals' migration propensities depend on their attitudes towards risk, but the empirical evidence, to the extent that it exists, has been indirect. In this paper, we use newly available data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to measure directly the relationship between migration propensities and attitudes towards risk. We find that individuals who are more willing to take risks are more likely to migrate between labor markets in Germany. This result is robust to stratifying by age, sex, education, national origin, and a variety of other demographic characteristics, as well as to the level of aggregation used to define geographic mobility. The effect is substantial relative to the unconditional migration propensity and compared to the conventional determinants of migration. We also find that being more willing to take risks is more important for the extensive than for the intensive margin of migration.
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Paper provided by Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), Department of Economics, University College London in its series CReAM Discussion Paper Series with number
0703.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Francesco Daveri & Riccardo Faini, .
"Where do migrants go?,"
Working Papers
124, IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University.
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