IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/stc/stcp3e/2003197e.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Wealth Position of Immigrant Families in Canada

Author

Listed:
  • Zhang, Xuelin

Abstract

The economic assimilation of immigrants is a key concern for economists and policy makers. The topic has been widely explored in terms of earnings assimilation of immigrants. Using the 1999 Survey of Financial Security, this study attempts to look at the issue from the wealth perspective. Among married families, immigrants have higher wealth than their native-born counterparts from the 40th to 90th percentiles of the distribution, with the wealth gap ranging between $20,000 and $78,000. Among single families, immigrants have higher wealth from the 55th to 95th percentiles, with the wealth gap ranging between $14,000 and $145,000. At the bottom of the distribution, however, evidence suggests that immigrants have lower wealth, although the gap is generally below $10,000. Various decomposition results indicate that the age of the major income recipient (and of the spouse for married families) as well as factors affecting permanent income explain a significant portion of the wealth gap in cases where immigrant families have higher wealth than the native-born. At the bottom of the wealth distribution, however, the wealth gap cannot be explained by the age of the major income recipient, permanent income factors, or family size (or lone-parent status), suggesting that low-wealth immigrant families may behave differently than low-wealth Canadian-born families in their wealth accumulation process. The wealth gap is also studied from a cohort perspective. Not surprisingly, recent immigrants have lower wealth than comparable Canadian-born families, and immigrants who arrived before 1976 have higher wealth. While immigrants who arrived in Canada between 1976 and 1985 are widely believed to initially have had more of an earnings disadvantage than their predecessors with respect to the Canadian-born, this study finds that, over the upper segment of the distribution, the wealth of this cohort is not significantly different from that of comparable Canadian-born families. But over the lower portion of the distribution, the cohort has lower wealth.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhang, Xuelin, 2003. "The Wealth Position of Immigrant Families in Canada," Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series 2003197e, Statistics Canada, Analytical Studies Branch.
    • Handle: RePEc:stc:stcp3e:2003197e
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/catalogue/11F0019M2003197
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Graziella Bertocchi & Marianna Brunetti & Anzelika Zaiceva, 2023. "The Financial Decisions of Immigrant and Native Households: Evidence from Italy," Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti, Springer;Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association), vol. 9(1), pages 117-174, March.
    2. Luann Good Gingrich & Naomi Lightman, 2015. "The Empirical Measurement of a Theoretical Concept: Tracing Social Exclusion among Racial Minority and Migrant Groups in Canada," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 3(4), pages 98-111.
    3. John Gibson & Trinh Le & Steven Stillman, 2007. "What explains the wealth gap between immigrants and the New Zealand born?," New Zealand Economic Papers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 41(2), pages 131-162.
    4. Muckenhuber, Mattias & Rehm, Miriam & Schnetzer, Matthias, 2021. "The migrant wealth gap at the household level: Evidence from RIF regressions for Austria," ifso working paper series 15, University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute for Socioeconomics (ifso).
    5. Mathä, Thomas Y. & Porpiglia, Alessandro & Sierminska, Eva, 2011. "The immigrant/native wealth gap in Germany, Italy and Luxembourg," Working Paper Series 1302, European Central Bank.
    6. Mattias Muckenhuber & Miriam Rehm & Matthias Schnetzer, 2022. "A Tale of Integration? The Migrant Wealth Gap in Austria," European Journal of Population, Springer;European Association for Population Studies, vol. 38(2), pages 163-190, May.
    7. Cobb-Clark, Deborah A. & Hildebrand, Vincent A., 2008. "The Asset Portfolios of Native-Born and Foreign-Born Households," IZA Discussion Papers 3304, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Denise Doiron & Rochelle Guttmann, 2009. "Wealth Distributions of Migrant and Australian‐born Households," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 85(268), pages 32-45, March.
    9. Matthew A. Painter & Zhenchao Qian, 2016. "Wealth Inequality Among Immigrants: Consistent Racial/Ethnic Inequality in the United States," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 35(2), pages 147-175, April.
    10. Katrin B. Anacker, 2013. "Immigrating, Assimilating, Cashing in? Analyzing Property Values in Suburbs of Immigrant Gateways," Housing Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(5), pages 720-745, July.
    11. Graziella Bertocchi & Marianna Brunetti & Anzelika Zaiceva, 2018. "The Financial Decisions of Immigrant and Native Households: Evidence from Italy," Department of Economics 0138, University of Modena and Reggio E., Faculty of Economics "Marco Biagi".

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:stc:stcp3e:2003197e. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Mark Brown (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/stagvca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.