The Long-Term Impact of International Migration on Economic Decision-Making: Evidence from a Migration Lottery and Lab-in-the-Field Experiments
John Gibson,
David McKenzie,
Halahingano Rohorua () and
Steven Stillman
Additional contact information
Halahingano Rohorua: University of Waikato
No 10110, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
Abstract:
We study how migration from a poor to a rich country affects key economic beliefs, preference parameters, and transnational household decision-making efficiency. Our setting is the migration of Tongans to New Zealand through a migration lottery program. In a ten-year follow-up survey of individuals applying for this program we elicit risk and time preferences and pro-market beliefs. We also link migrants and potential migrants to a partner household consisting of family members who would stay behind if they moved. We play lab-in-the-field games designed to measure the degree of intra-family trust and the efficiency of intra-family decision-making. Migration provides a large and permanent positive shock to income, a large change in economic institutions, and a reduction in interactions with partner household members. Despite these changes, we find no significant impacts of migration on risk and time preferences, pro-market beliefs, or in the decision-making efficiency of transnational households. This stability in the face of such a large and life-changing event lends credence to economic models of migration that treat these determinants of decision-making as time-invariant, and contrasts with recent evidence on preference changes after negative shocks.
Keywords: household efficiency; preferences; economic beliefs; migration; transnational household (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 D81 F22 O12 P1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2016-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)
Published - published in: Journal of Development Economics, 2019, 138, 99-115
Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp10110.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: The long-term impact of international migration on economic decision-making: Evidence from a migration lottery and lab-in-the-field experiments (2019) 
Working Paper: The Long-Term Impact of International Migration on Economic Decision-Making: Evidence from a Migration Lottery and Lab-in-the-Field Experiments (2016) 
Working Paper: The long-term impact of international migration on economic decision-making: evidence from a migration lottery and lab-in-the-field experiments (2016) 
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:iza:izadps:dp10110
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().