Cultural Distance and Internal Migration: Evidence from Indonesia

Yao Wang

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2026, vol. 74, issue 2, 565 - 606

Abstract: By use of rich ethnolinguistic and migration data, this paper studies how cultural distance affects internal migration in Indonesia. I estimate a migration gravity equation using linguistic distance as a proxy for cultural distance and data from the 1930 colonial census to instrument for current linguistic distance. The findings reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship: greater cultural distance initially encourages migration between culturally closer location pairs, but this trend reverses as cultural distance increases. Analysis of the underlying mechanisms suggests that skill complementarity and amenity effects drive the positive impacts, while communication barriers and intergroup tolerance contribute to higher migration costs.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/736707 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/736707 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/736707

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().