Immigrant’s legal status, permanence in the destination country and the distribution of consumption expenditure

This paper considers the distribution of consumption expenditures for a large sample of documented and undocumented immigrants in Italy. Using the one-sided and two-sided Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests, we show that the distribution of consumption of immigrants with higher permanence in the host country first-order stochastically dominates the one of immigrants with lower permanence. These distributions are first-order stochastically dominated by the ones of natives with similar characteristics. Apart from differences in the first years since migration, undocumented immigrants show similar consumption distributions to the ones of documented immigrants. All results also hold when correcting for possible immigrants’ misreporting on their legal status.