The Cost of Migrating to a Culturally Different Location

Oliver Falck, Alfred Lameli and Jens Ruhose ()

No 4992, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Ever since Sjaastad (1962), researchers have struggled to quantify the psychic cost of migration. We monetize psychic cost as the wage premium for moving to a culturally different location. We combine administrative social security panel data with a proxy for cultural difference based on historical dialect dissimilarity between German counties. Conditional on geographic distance and pre-migration wage profiles, we find that migrants demand a (indexed with respect to local rents) wage premium of about 1 (1.5) percent for overcoming one standard deviation in cultural dissimilarity. The effect is driven by males, more pronounced for geographically short moves, and persistent over time.

Keywords: migration costs; culture; internal migration; psychic cost (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D51 J61 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Working Paper: The Cost of Migrating to a Culturally Different Location (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_4992

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