In this paper, we examine possible macro‐level determinants underlying the number of trips emigrants make back home by exploiting a panel of data comprising 25 countries over the period 1995–2010. To guide the empirical work, we first construct a simple model of the decision by emigrants to visit their home country. The model predicts, among other things, that the effects of distance on the frequency of visiting home are negative but the impact of the host country's wage on the decision to visit home is ambiguous: It depends on the legal status of the emigrants in the host country. Our empirical results based on a pooled estimator support these predictions. First, the number of trips back home is inversely related to distance but positively related to income and institutional quality. Second, emigrants living in Africa and North America are less likely to visit home, whereas emigrants living in the Arabian Gulf countries visit home more often. The results from cross‐sectional estimations provide very similar results, indicating that our results are robust to alternative estimation approaches. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.