Print Email Facebook Twitter Does Migration Make You Happy? A Longitudinal Study of Internal Migration and Subjective Well-Being (discussion paper) Title Does Migration Make You Happy? A Longitudinal Study of Internal Migration and Subjective Well-Being (discussion paper) Author Nowok, B. Van Ham, M. Findlay, A. Gayle, V. Faculty OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment Date 2011-11-01 Abstract The majority of modelling studies on consequences of internal migration focus almost exclusively on the labour market outcomes and the material well-being of migrants. We investigate whether individuals who migrate within the UK become happier after the move than they were before it and whether the effect is permanent or transient. Using life satisfaction responses from 12 waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and employing a fixed-effects model, we derive a temporal pattern of migrants’ subjective wellbeing (SWB) around the time of the migration event. Our findings make an original contribution by revealing for the first time that, on average, migration is preceded by a period when individuals experience a significant decline in happiness. The boost that is received through migration appears to bring people back to their initial level of happiness. As opposed to labour market outcomes of migration, SWB outcomes do not differ significantly between men and women. Perhaps surprisingly, long-distance migrants are at least as happy as short-distance migrants despite the higher social costs that are involved. Subject migrationhappinesssubjective well-beinglongitudinal dataUK To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:02e45b56-a4ac-45d2-8644-f979721b3486 Publisher Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit/ Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Source IZA Discussion Paper 6140 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights (c) 2011 The Author(s) Files PDF 276524.pdf 617.37 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:02e45b56-a4ac-45d2-8644-f979721b3486/datastream/OBJ/view