International migration is often characterised as a process of immigration from economically less developed to highly developed countries. Whereas the factors driving those flows and the integration of the respective ethnic groups are widely analysed, the international mobility of the populations of precisely those affluent societies is regularly missed and less-frequently studied. The chapter describes the research design of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study as one of the first endeavours to study the internationally mobile populations from prosperous welfare states. Following an origin-based probability sampling of internationally migrating German citizens, it offers survey data to study the consequences of emigration and remigration along the life course. The chapter discusses the quality of this new data infrastructure along the survey lifecycle and compares the distribution of central demographic characteristics in the survey with official reference statistics. The aim is to establish this approach as a new avenue for studying the global lives of internationally mobile populations.

This chapter investigates individual wage changes of German emigrants. The analytical strategy is twofold. First, we compare hourly wage changes among emigrants with wage changes among stayers. We estimate the Difference-in-Difference of mean net hourly wages between stayers and emigrants over time and account for the positive selection of emigrants on observable characteristics through entropy balancing. Second, we explore the heterogeneity of wage changes among emigrants. To that end, we calculate linear regressions on the log net hourly wage change through migration. The first analysis suggests substantial wage increases of 8 euros through migration. The second analysis provides evidence that characteristics of employment and of destination countries account for differences in the wage change among emigrants. Among individual characteristics, only age is negatively correlated, while education and gender do not account for differences. Our analysis rely on the first wave of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study. The German Socio-Economic Panel Study yields our reference population of stayers.

The chapter asks about possible causal effects of migration on subjective well-being (SWB) measured by self-reported overall life satisfaction. By combining the emigration sample of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS) with a quasi-counterfactual sample of internationally non-mobile Germans provided by the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) the difference-in-difference analyses show that emigration is actually accompanied by an increase in SWB. Based on propensity score matching procedures and compared to non-mobile German stayers, German first-time emigrants show a significant increase in SWB shortly after arrival in their host country. For most emigrants, migration pays off not only economically via increasing incomes but also with regard to an increase in life satisfaction. However, the underlying analysis has certain limitations and we therefore discuss the significance of the presented evidence and consequences and challenges for future research.

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