IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/jeurec/v4y2006i5p1014-1037.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Staunching Emigration from East Germany: Age and the Determinants of Migration

Author

Listed:
  • Jennifer Hunt

Abstract

Following the unification of Germany in 1990, eastern wages and unemployment both rose rapidly. I demonstrate that rising wages reduced eastern emigration greatly, while rising unemployment had little effect. This reflects the behavior of the young, who are very sensitive to source region wages, and relatively insensitive to source unemployment. I show that most of the effect of source unemployment comes from the contemporaneous effect on those laid-off, who are more likely to be older. I find that, compared to stayers, young emigrants are much more skilled, older emigrants are slightly more skilled, and commuters are not more skilled, as measured by education and pre-move wages. My conclusions are based on a comparison of results from aggregate inter-state migration data and individual data from the eastern sample of the German Socio-Economic Panel for 1990-2000. (JEL: J61, P23) (c) 2006 by the European Economic Association.

Suggested Citation

  • Jennifer Hunt, 2006. "Staunching Emigration from East Germany: Age and the Determinants of Migration," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 4(5), pages 1014-1037, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:jeurec:v:4:y:2006:i:5:p:1014-1037
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1542-4774/issues
    File Function: link to full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • P23 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist and Transition Economies - - - Factor and Product Markets; Industry Studies; Population

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:jeurec:v:4:y:2006:i:5:p:1014-1037. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kelly McDougall (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.