The Cost of Migrating to a Culturally Different Location

Jens Ruhose (), Oliver Falck and Alfred Lameli

VfS Annual Conference 2014 (Hamburg): Evidence-based Economic Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

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 unique data on historical dialect dissimilarity between German counties. Conditional on geographic distance and pre-migration wage profiles, we find that migrants demand a wage premium of about 1 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.

JEL-codes: D51 J61 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
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:zbw:vfsc14:100327

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