Melting pot or salad bowl: Cultural distance and housing investments

Yongheng Deng, Maggie R. Hu and Adrian Lee ()

Real Estate Economics, 2021, vol. 49, issue S1, 235-267

Abstract: This paper investigates whether individuals’ cultural background affects their housing investment decisions, drawing inferences from property location choices, and transaction prices in Australia. We propose a novel measure of cultural distance for each homebuyer–neighborhood pair, adopting the six‐dimensional cultural framework of Hofstede. Our measure captures interethnicity similarity and thus measures the cultural similarity of each buyer and neighborhood pair at a more granular level. Utilizing housing transaction data of a culturally diverse city Sydney, Australia, we find that buyers are more likely to buy properties in neighborhoods with a shorter cultural distance to their culture of origin and are willing to pay a premium for properties in those locations, consistent with buyers’ preference for cultural proximity. Further, we show that cultural proximity preference is stronger for ethnicities from recent migration waves, particularly Asia. Our findings are generalizable to other regions with ethnic aggregations and offer new insights into the growing literature on culture and household finance as well as the urban economics literature.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6229.12311

Related works:
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:bla:reesec:v:49:y:2021:i:s1:p:235-267

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1080-8620

Access Statistics for this article

Real Estate Economics is currently edited by Crocker Liu, N. Edward Coulson and Walter Torous

More articles in Real Estate Economics from American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().