Testing the Remittance Decay Hypothesis with Appropriate Data: Transnational Family Arrangements and Remitting Behavior among Senegalese Migrants in Europe

Amparo Gonzalez-Ferrer, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Cris Beauchemin, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Inmaculada Serrano, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)

Explanations of remitting behavior of international migrants have largely based on the work of Lucas and Stark (1985), developed in the context of internal urban-rural migration. The extent to which long distances, restrictive immigration policies and transnational family arrangements modify the applicability of the New Economics of Labour Migration to explain both return and remitting behavior has been hardly questioned. The importance of transnational family arrangements, which allow to prolong stays abroad without breaking the implicit contract between the migrant and the left-behinds, is likely to alter the expected duration of migration and, consequently, the temporal pattern of remittances. In this paper, we take advantage of the longitudinal and multisited micro-data collected by the MAFE Project to disentangle the simultaneous effect of length of residence at destination, period of arrival and the process of family separation-reunification, on gendered remitting patterns of Senegalese migrants in Europe.