How do migrants save? Evidence from the British Household Panel Survey on temporary and permanent migrants versus natives

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

June 15, 2015

Summary:

This paper investigates the saving behavior of migrants in the UK across different
dimensions, i.e., comparing temporary versus permanent migrants and migrants versus
natives. Established theoretical predictions show that migrants save more when they
plan to stay in the destination only temporarily as target savers. Our empirical evidence
takes into account the contemporaneous choice of savings and remittances. Moreover,
when comparing the saving profiles of both natives and migrants, we uncover the weight
of observable socio‐economic characteristics other than income and wealth. We use
the British Household Panel Survey for the period 1991‐2008. The estimation results
confirm that temporary migrants have a propensity to save 26 per cent higher than
permanent migrants in UK. We also introduce an index of financial capability adjusted
for income as an explanatory variable and, when employing the Blinder‐Oaxaca decomposition
for the Tobit model of saving choice, migrants are more affected by observable social‐economic
characteristics than natives.

Published in

IZA Journal of Migration

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40176-015-0034-y

ISSN

21939039

Subjects

Notes

Open Access journal

© 2015 Arcangelis and Joxhe; licensee Springer.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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