The Return Motivations of Legal Permanent Migrants: Evidence from Exchange Rate Shocks and Immigrants in Australia

Paolo Abarcar ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Why do legal permanent migrants return to their home countries? How do home country conditions influence this decision? This paper uses exogenous home country exchange rate shocks arising from the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis to distinguish return motivations of a national sample of Australian immigrants. On average, a 10% favorable exchange rate shock (a depreciation in the home country currency) leads to a reduced likelihood of return of 0.37 percentage points for migrants. The effect is found to be stronger for those who had pre-existing intentions to return, weaker for those undecided, and zero for those who initially stated their desire to stay. These results favor a life-cycle explanation for migrant behavior and reject the theory that migrants are target earners who seek to invest upon return home.

Keywords: return migration; exchange rates; Asian Financial Crisis; migrants; immigrants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J15 J6 J61 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-06-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/47832/1/MPRA_paper_47832.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/63535/1/MPRA_paper_63535.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The return motivations of legal permanent migrants: Evidence from exchange rate shocks and immigrants in Australia (2017)
Working Paper: The Return Motivations of Legal Permanent Migrants: Evidence from Exchange Rate Shocks and Immigrants in Australia
Working Paper: The Return Motivations of Legal Permanent Migrants: Evidence from Exchange Rate Shocks and Immigrants in Australia
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:47832

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().