Cultural Change and the Migration Choice

Mauro Lanati and Alessandra Venturini
Additional contact information
Mauro Lanati: European University Institute

No 11415, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Cultural differences play an important role in shaping migration patterns. The conventional proxies for cross country cultural differences – such as common language, ethnicity, genetic traits or religion – implicitly assume that cultural proximity between two countries is constant over time and symmetric, which is far from realistic. This paper proposes a tractable model for international migration which explicitly allows for the time varying and asymmetric dimensions of cultural proximity. Similarly to Disdier et al (2010) we assume that the evolution of bilateral cultural affinity over time is reflected in the intensity of bilateral trade in cultural goods. Our empirical framework includes a comprehensive set of high dimensional fixed effects which enables for the identification of the impact of cultural proximity on migration over and beyond the effect of pre-existing cultural and historical ties. The results are robust across different econometric techniques and suggest that positive changes in cultural relationships over time foster bilateral migration.

Keywords: gravity model; trade in cultural goods; migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F16 F22 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2018-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-int and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: Review of World Economy, 2021, 157, 799 - 852

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11415.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Cultural change and the migration choice (2021)
Working Paper: Cultural Change and the Migration Choice (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11415

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().