Miserable Migrants? Natural Experiment Evidence on International Migration and Objective and Subjective Well-Being

Steven Stillman, John Gibson, David McKenzie and Halahingano Rohorua

World Development, 2015, vol. 65, issue C, 79-93

Abstract: We compare successful and unsuccessful applicants to a migration lottery in order to examine the impact of migration on objective and subjective well-being. The results show that international migration brings large improvements in objective well-being. Impacts on subjective well-being are complex, with mental health improving but happiness declining, self-rated welfare rising if viewed retrospectively but static if viewed experimentally, self-rated social respect rising retrospectively but falling experimentally and subjective income adequacy rising. We further show that these changes would not be predicted from cross-sectional regressions on the correlates of subjective well-being in either Tonga or New Zealand.

Keywords: immigration; lottery; natural experiment; subjective well-being; Tonga; Pacific Islands (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (48)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X13001654
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Miserable Migrants? Natural Experiment Evidence on International Migration and Objective and Subjective Well-Being (2012)
Working Paper: Miserable Migrants? Natural Experiment Evidence on International Migration and Objective and Subjective Well-Being (2012)
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:eee:wdevel:v:65:y:2015:i:c:p:79-93

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2013.07.003

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().