Are Movers More Egalitarian than Stayers? An Intergenerational Perspective on Intra-Household Financial Decision-Making

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate the role of international migration in shaping the financial decision-making behaviors of married couples through a comparison of three generations of Turkish migrants to Europe (i.e., movers) with their counterparts who remained in Turkey (i.e., stayers). The data are drawn from a subset of personal data from the 2000 Families Survey, involving 4,215 interviews performed randomly with married individuals nested within 1,713 families. The results suggest that international migration increases the tendency for spouses to jointly decide on their finances by (1) weakening the intergenerational transmission of traditional financial decision-making behaviors and gender ideologies and (2) enabling more intense acculturation of younger generations within “less patriarchal” contexts. With its unique, intergenerational, and multisite perspective, the study provides particular insight into the understudied relationship between migration and intra-household decision-making and its benefits for gender equality.