International migration and subjective well-being

Abstract

In many economically highly-developed countries, a relevant proportion of the population migrates across national boundaries every year. For these individuals, migrating abroad not only comes with advantages (e.g. monetary returns) but also with potential pitfalls, because migration is accompanied by profound changes in everyday life. However, only few and mainly cross-sectional studies about individuals’ migration expierences exist, analysing the effects of migration on their quality of life. This study addresses these lacunae and investigates shifts in subjective well-being (SWB) of internationally mobile German citizens. We apply fixed effects (FE) panel regression models to data of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS). To observe SWB in the course of migration, we draw on a sample of repeat migrants—Germans who returned to Germany shortly before the panel and migrated again across international borders during the panel. As counterfactuals, we focus on Germans who returned to Germany shortly before the panel but stayed there. Overall life satisfaction is used as an SWB-indicator, which corresponds to a global assessment of one’s life situation. In sum, our analyses reveal a happiness dip before migration as well as an increased and relatively stable SWB at the pre-migration baseline level in the first two years after migration.