The European crisis and migration to Germany

The size of migration flows to Germany from other European countries surged in the aftermath of the 2010 European crisis, and this paper explores the main determinants of this large increase. International migrants tend to move more than once in their lives, and migration episodes to Germany make no exception in this respect. This paper explores some relevant implications of this simple observation for the estimation of gravity models, which is done here with bilateral monthly migration data. We demonstrate that ignoring the sequential nature of migration decisions gives rise to multilateral resistance to migration, thus substantially biasing the estimates. We also show that the expectations about future economic conditions at origin significantly influence bilateral migration flows to Germany. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.