Risk Aversion and the Willingness to Migrate in 30 Countries

Peter Huber and Klaus Nowotny

No 569, WIFO Working Papers from WIFO

Abstract: We use individual level data covering 30 mostly post-communist and developing countries which account for over a fifth of the worldwide immigrant stock to assess the impact of risk aversion on the willingness to migrate. Consistent with theories of individual level migration decisions, risk aversion has a statistically significant negative impact on both the willingness to migrate within countries as well as abroad. This applies to virtually all countries considered and is robust across various specifications, to alternative measures of risk aversion and to different measures of the willingness to migrate. Differences in the impact of risk aversion on the willingness to migrate are also positively correlated to measures of sending country risks and the missing variable bias of omitting risk aversion from migration regressions is substantial.

Keywords: Former Communist Countries; Migration intentions; Risk Aversion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-mig, nep-upt and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wifo.ac.at/wwa/pubid/61283 abstract (text/html)

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:wfo:wpaper:y:2018:i:569

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in WIFO Working Papers from WIFO Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Florian Mayr ().