The Psychic Costs of Migration: Evidence from Irish Return Migrants

Alan Barrett and Irene Mosca

No 6324, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Within the economics literature, the "psychic costs" of migration have been incorporated into theoretical models since Sjaastad (1962). However, the existence of such costs has rarely been investigated in empirical papers. In this paper, we look at the psychic costs of migration using alcohol problems as an indicator. Rather than comparing immigrants and natives, we look at the native-born in a single country and compare those who have lived away for a period of their lives and those who have not. We use data from the first wave of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) which is a large, nationally representative sample of older Irish adults. We find that men who lived away are more likely to have suffered from alcohol problems than men who stayed. For women, we again see a higher incidence of alcohol problems for short-term migrants. However, long-term female migrants are less likely to have suffered from alcohol problems.

Keywords: alcoholism; psychic costs of migration; migrants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 I10 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2012-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published - revised version published in: Journal of Population Economics, 2013, 26 (2), 483-506

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6324.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The psychic costs of migration: evidence from Irish return migrants (2013)
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:dp6324

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 ().