Financial Asset Ownership: The Case of Chinese and Indian Immigrants to the United States

Abstract

Financial asset ownership is important for a large number of scholarly and practical reasons including for understanding saving propensities, risk taking, personal financial strategies, inequality, the flow of funds across national borders, and organizational marketing strategies. Yet we know little about group differences in approaches to owning various financial instruments. Chinese and Indian immigrants to the United States are large, growing, and diverse groups who are rapidly beginning to comprise a large portion of the U.S. population and whose unique financial asset ownership patterns offer insight into the factors that contribute to cross-group differences in this important behavior. The article studies how members of these two important groups own particular assets. Use data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and find that, Chinese and Indian immigrants do, indeed, exhibit unique asset ownership patterns when they are compared to native whites, African Americans, and other immigrants. Their ownership of stocks and mutual funds, interest-earning bank accounts, retirement accounts and whole life insurance. My findings demonstrate that age, tenure in the United States, education, and family traits are important meditating in the relationship between country of birth and financial asset ownership.