March 2006

IZA DP No. 1999: Native-Migrant Differences in Risk Attitudes

published in: Applied Economics Letters, 2009, 16 (15), 1581-1586

This paper 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.