Cultural Biases in Migration: Estimating Non-Monetary Migration Costs

Oliver Falck, Alfred Lameli () and Jens Ruhose ()
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Alfred Lameli: University of Marburg

No 8922, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Ever since Sjaastad (1962), researchers have struggled to quantify the psychic costs 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 and those who earn above average occupational wages before migration, 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)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published - published in: Papers in Regional Science, 2018, 97 (2), 411-438

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Related works:
Journal Article: Cultural biases in migration: Estimating non‐monetary migration costs (2018)
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