Determinants of Savings, Remittances, and Spending Patterns among U.S. Migrants in Four Mexican Communities |
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| Authors: | Douglas S Massey Lawrence C Basem |
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| Institution: | Douglas S. Massey is a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of Chicago. He earned his doctorate degree in 1978 from Princeton University. He has just completed a co-authored book on the depiction of U.S. migration in Mexican folk art and is working on a book in collaboration with Nancy Denton on the role that segregation has played in creating the U.S. urban underclass.;Lawrence C. Basem is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology and the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago. His interests are in the sociology of economic development, international migration, the social psychological dimensions of stratification, and the history and philosophy of social science. |
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| Abstract: | In this paper we attempt to overcome several weaknesses of earlier field studies of the effect of international migration on sending communities. In general, these studies fail to employ representative samples of migrants, specify theoretical models of decision-making, or control for a variety of individual and household characteristics likely to affect how migrants dispose of their earnings, including sample selectivity. Representative samples of Mexican migrants from four sending communities are used to estimate a theoretical model that controls for a variety of individual, family, and trip characteristics; other stages of the analysis also control for sample selectivity. The findings suggest that migrant decision-making is strongly and consistently determined by social capital and community membership, with other variables playing ancillary roles in different decision processes. The propensities to save, remit, and invest productively generally rose as ties to the United States increased, and were generally higher in communities with well-developed local economies. |
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