Does integration increase life satisfaction ?

by | Apr 6, 2013 | Research Publications

Author:

Koczan, Zsoka

Abstract:

In recent years there has been a rapidly increasing interest in measuring subjective well-being in economics; most of the literature on immigrants has however continued to focus on ‘objective’ measures of integration such as employment and education outcomes. This paper aims to complement these studies by looking at the subjective consequences of these objective situations, focusing on the integration of immigrants once settled in the host country. We find that, contrary to the results of most of the existing literature, immigrants are not less satisfied than natives once we control for the details of their employment conditions, such as job insecurity and whether working in the occupation trained for. Immigrants are not hurt more by adverse shocks such as job loss and segregation does not affect their life satisfaction per se. While having host country citizenship appears to have a large, significant positive effect in a simple pooled OLS specification, exploiting a natural experiment of changes in the citizenship law in the host country we find that this is driven by a selection effect rather than an increase in life satisfaction due to obtaining citizenship.

Document:

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.5747

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