The Less Extreme, the More You Leave: Radical Islam and Willingness to Migrate

This paper presents a model to explain how cultural traits affect the willingness to migrate, focusing in particular on the role played by radical Islam. In our model, more radical values imply a higher psychological cost of migrating deriving from the fact that connections with socio- religious friends and neighbors are not maintained after migration, thus deterring individuals from migrating. We test the prediction of the model by using micro-level data from the Arab Barometer. We find that, ceteris paribus, more radical individuals are less willing to migrate. This finding is robust to alternative specifications of the model and to the use of econometric techniques aimed at addressing the potential endogeneity of radical Islam. The result is also qualitatively unchanged when using aggregate data on actual outflows of migrants.