TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Stillman, Steven
AU  - Gibson, John
AU  - McKenzie, David
AU  - Rohorua, Halahingano
        TI  - Miserable Migrants? Natural Experiment Evidence on International Migration and Objective and Subjective Well-Being
        PY  - 2012/Sep/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 6871
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp6871
        AB  - Over 200 million people worldwide live outside their country of birth and typically experience large gains in material well-being by moving to where incomes are higher. But effects of migration on subjective well-being are less clear, with some studies suggesting that migrants are miserable in their new locations. Observational studies are potentially biased by the self-selection of migrants so a natural experiment is used to compare successful and unsuccessful applicants to a migration lottery in order to experimentally estimate the impact of migration on objective and subjective well-being. The results show that international migration brings large improvements in objective well-being, in terms of incomes and expenditures. Impacts on subjective well-being are complex, with mental health improving but happiness declining, self-rated welfare rising if viewed retrospectively but static if viewed experimentally, self-rated social respect rising retrospectively but falling experimentally and subjective income adequacy rising. We further show that these changes would not be predicted from cross-sectional regressions on the correlates of subjective well-being in either Tonga or New Zealand. More broadly, our results highlight the difficulties of measuring changes in subjective well-being when reference frames change, as likely occurs with migration.
        KW  - immigration
KW  - lottery
KW  - natural experiment
KW  - subjective well-being
KW  - Tonga
KW  - Pacific Islands
        ER  -