Residential Mobility in a Constrained Housing Market: Implications for Ethnic Populations in Germany

Abstract

The rates of residential mobility in Germany are significantly lower than in the United States, and even lower than in some other European countries. The lower mobility rates can be viewed as outcomes of a ‘tight’ housing market. It can be hypothesized that, because ethnic minorities (‘foreigners’ in German terminology) have lower incomes and face discrimination, they are likely to be more constrained than the native-born German population, and so have even lower mobility rates. The authors use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and a series of logistic regression models to examine the interaction of nationality and residential mobility. They show that in fact the foreign-born population is slightly more mobile than the native German population, and that the constrained housing market does not appear to affect the foreign-born population differentially. At the same time, the greater mobility of the foreign-born population can be explained by their attempts to overcome higher rates of crowding.