خدمات مالی رفتار مصرف میان مصرف کنندگان آمریکایی اسپانیایی تبار

This study creates a generalized framework to explain Hispanic financial asset consumption behavior, and then develops and tests four research hypotheses derived from this framework. The findings demonstrate that Hispanic consumer choices of financial products generate investment portfolios that differ markedly from their non-Hispanic White (NHW) counterparts. In particular, Hispanic portfolios reflect a clear preference for near-term savings, favoring liquidity and low investment risk at the expense of higher yielding assets, and Hispanic investors demonstrate a strong affinity for insurance products, perhaps using these investments to fund intergenerational transfer of wealth over time. Less prevalent in Hispanic families' investment portfolios is significant investment in financial assets offering relatively high returns, such as common stock, mutual funds, brokerage accounts, and corporate bonds. This leads Hispanic households to exhibit investment balances that are significantly smaller than their NHW counterparts and accumulate wealth at a far slower pace over time.

In the past 10 years, the American Hispanic community has grown in size and prominence to become the largest minority segment of the U.S. population. Between 1990 and 2000, the Hispanic population grew by 59%, from 22 million to 35 million individuals, representing 12.5% of the U.S. population in 2001 (Desimone, 2000). Moreover, the Midwest, South, and Northeast regions of the United States experienced the largest percentage increase in Hispanic residents, reflecting the increased dispersion of this minority group across the American landscape. In addition to this increased dispersion, the Hispanic community in the United States represents a diverse ethnic group whose members trace their origins to Mexico (66%), Central and South America (14.5%), Puerto Rico (9%), Cuba (4%), and other Spanish-speaking countries (6.4%). Accordingly, the term Hispanic is really a generic label used to describe individuals from three different regions—Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean—comprising over 20 separate nationalities (Webster, 1994). Nevertheless, while there are important and substantive differences between various Hispanic subcultures, the cultural, attitudinal, and behavioral similarities of different Hispanic subgroups often lead researchers to aggregate different subgroups into a single group Loza, 1988, Fan and Solis Zuiker, 1994 and Wagner and Soberon-Ferrer, 1990. Following this convention, we treat various Hispanic subgroups as a single segment in contrasting their consumer behavior with that of non-Hispanic White (NHW) households. Despite the rapid population growth and increased geographic dispersion observed across the Hispanic community, there is virtually no research in the marketing and finance literatures that examines Hispanic consumer behavior differences with respect to financial investment products. This study seeks to fill this gap—and has two specific research objectives. First, it uses the extant marketing literature to construct an explanatory framework for Hispanic consumption patterns for retail financial products. Second, it tests this generalized framework using household financial data drawn from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) published by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The remainder of this paper is organized into five sections. Section 2 presents and describes the generalized explanatory framework and, based on it, develops four research hypotheses. Section 3 introduces the SCF data set, and Section 4 presents the empirical results. Section 5 discusses these results, explains how Hispanic investment choices disadvantage these investors, and offers some promising directions for future research. Finally, Section 6 provides conclusions regarding the key issues addressed in this study.

A wide and expanding body of academic literature characterizes cultural differences between Hispanic and NHW individuals, describes buyer behavior differences between these individuals, and examines money attitude differences present in Hispanic versus NHW households. This study builds upon these reported money attitude differences to construct a general explanation of the investment behavior of Hispanic households and explain how this investment behavior differs from NHW households. Using the Federal Reserve SCF database, the results show that Hispanic families' financial investment behavior is marked by strong preferences for financial liquidity, intergenerational wealth transfer via life insurance, and owner-occupied real property. The most troubling aspect of Hispanic families' reported investment behavior is the absence of investment in financial asset categories offering relatively high returns, such as common stock, mutual funds, corporate bonds, municipal bonds, and brokerage accounts. It would appear that Hispanic investors perceive these securities as carrying unacceptable investment risks, offering diminished liquidity, and requiring an unacceptably distant investment horizon. Consequently, Hispanic families overinvest, in relative terms, in highly liquid financial assets that offer heightened liquidity only in exchange for relatively lower rates of return over shorter investment periods. Given this investment strategy, these households forego the benefits of financial compounding over a lengthy investment horizon at the higher annualized rates of return associated with debt, equity, and mutual fund investments. This results in a diminished rate of wealth accumulation over time, and a smaller stock of total accumulated wealth at any given point in time, within Hispanic households. It is clear from this evidence that there is an opportunity to assist Hispanic families in achieving greater financial success, and financial professionals and institutions can play a role in doing so. A key aspect of such a role is an educational component to improve Hispanics' familiarity and sophistication regarding the broad range of financial products and services. Such efforts should be structured in ways that reflect an understanding of Hispanic culture and an appreciation for Hispanic values. Those institutions and professionals that make the effort to do so would be providing a worthwhile and important service to a growing ethnic segment of consumers.