Native-migrant differences in risk attitudes

Abstract

This article questions the perceived wisdom that migrants are more risk-loving than the native population. We employ a new large German survey of direct individual risk measures to find that first-generation migrants have lower risk attitudes than natives, which only equalize in the second generation.

Acknowledgements

Financial support from Volkswagen Foundation for the IZA project on ‘The Economics and Persistence of Migrant Ethnicity’ is gratefully acknowledged. We are grateful to the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS) in Washington to host some of us during the completion of this manuscript. We also wish to thank Barry Chiswick, seminar participants and the IZA-Volkswagen Ethnicity Research Team for valuable comments on an earlier draft.