This paper questions the perceived wisdom that migrants are more risk-loving than the native population. We employ a new large German survey of direct individual risk measures to find that first-generation migrants have lower risk attitudes than natives, which only equalize in the second generation.

Using a large new dataset, we analyze the labor market performance of Portuguese workers in Germany. While previous work compares wages and characteristics of migrants only to those of the natives, we match the data also with an equivalent survey from the sending country. We find that Portuguese...