Who is Thinking of Leaving Germany? The Role of Postmaterialism, Risk Attitudes, and Life-Satisfaction on Emigration Intentions of German Nationals

Elena Samarsky

No 1066, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: The subject of emigration from affluent countries, such as Germany, raises the question of who are more likely to leave their highly-industrialized countries known for high living standards, stable political scene and prosperous economy. Using the theory of postmaterialism (Inglehart, 1997) this paper explores emigration intentions of German nationals taking into account country’s specific socio-economic context through the value sets of its nationals. By analyzing emigration intentions of German nationals recorded by the German SocioEconomic Panel (SOEP) the findings link postmaterialism theory to emigration intentions, and show that those who express emigration intentions are more likely to have postmaterialistic values than materialistic or mixed values. Furthermore, when controlling for life-satisfaction and risk attitudes, the effect of postmaterialistic and materialistic values on intentions to emigrate remain significant. Lastly, the analysis corroborates other studies by showing that those who display emigration intentions also more likely to have higher risk tolerance and lower life-satisfaction.

Keywords: Migration intentions; value set; risk attitudes; life-satisfaction; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 p.
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in 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.725357.de/diw_sp1066.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_sp1066

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 ().