Remittance Behavior, Acculturation, and Socio-Cultural-Economic Factors: A Case Study of Latinos in the Chicago Metropolitan Area

Sung Chun, University of Notre Dame
Wei Sun

This paper uses data from the Chicago Area Survey (CAS) recently finished by the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. The CAS interviewed 1,500 Latino households in six county Chicago metropolitan areas. Compared to previous studies, the CAS contains rich information on Latinos’ remittance behavior, religiosity, and financial market participation, as well as other general demographic and socioeconomic variables—nativity, age, education, gender, income, immigration status, national origin, and language. The contribution of this paper is to emphasize the effects of acculturation on the probability of having remitted, and the value of remittances transferred to Latin America by individual migrants. This will be done by defining a broader measure of acculturation, such as length of time spent in the U.S., financial market participation, and church or community involvement, controlling for nativity, immigration demographic variables, and community context “proxied” by population density, homeownership rate, and poverty concentration.