Quantifying Determinants of Immigration Preferences

Ole-Petter Moe Hansen () and Stefan Legge ()

No 1710, Economics Working Paper Series from University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science

Abstract: This paper quantifies the relative importance of determinants of individual-level immigration preferences. We develop and estimate a new latent-factor model using survey data on eighteen countries from the European Social Survey from 2014 and 2015. On a metho-dological level, we address several potential problems causing biased estimates. Identifying individual-level economic concerns about immigration, worries about compositional amenities, racism, and altruism as drivers of immigration-related preferences, the estimation results show that racism is quantitatively the most important factor. It is about as important as the joint effect of worries about the economic and non-economic effects of immigration. Furthermore, we document that altruism raises significantly the support for immigration, although it is quantitatively less important than the other factors.

Keywords: Altruism; Compositional Amenities; Economic Concerns; Immigration Preferences; Racism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 H2 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2017-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:usg:econwp:2017:10

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