Population Aging and Individual Attitudes toward Immigration: Disentangling Age, Cohort and Time Effects

Lena Calahorrano

No 389, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: In the face of rising old-age dependency ratios in industrialized countries like Germany, politicians and their electorates discuss the loosening of immigration policies as one policy option to ensure the sustainability of public social security systems. The question arises whether this policy option is feasible in aging countries: older individuals are typically found to be more averse to immigration. However, cross-sectional investigations may confound age with cohort effects. This investigation uses the 1999-2008 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel to separate the effect of age on immigration attitudes from cohort and also from time effects. Over the life cycle stated immigration concerns are predicted to increase well into retirement and decrease afterward. Relative to other issues, immigration concerns are found to actually decrease over the life cycle.

Keywords: Immigration; demographic change; political economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 F22 J10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 p.
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem, nep-eur, nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.376619.de/diw_sp0389.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp389

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().