Steady streams and sudden bursts: persistence patterns in remittance decisions

This paper is the first systematic attempt to investigate the factors affecting time persistence in remittance behaviour at the individual level. We argue that the time profile of remittance ows from individual migrants is of considerable theoretical relevance and also has very important policy implications. By using micro-level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) we apply a wide variety of discrete choice (static and dynamic) panel models and show that persistence occurs at the individual level due to observable characteristics (individual income, household characteristics, etc.) but also to time-invariant unobserved individual characteristics. In addition, remittance decisions seem to be signicantly infl uenced by "true state dependence", namely correlation between past actual behaviour and future propensity to remit.