Cultural Heterozygosity: Towards a New Measure of Within-Country Cultural Diversity

Many countries are becoming increasingly culturally heterogeneous and diverse. Yet, the cross-cultural research literature has only paid limited attention to the measurement of within-country cultural diversity. Following an analogy from evolutionary biology, this article proposes a novel index of cultural heterozygosity, which takes the individual as a starting point. It develops a distribution-free algorithm, which compares all individuals in a given country sample with each other. This index is different from commonly used fractionalization indices; its relevance for international business research is illustrated with an empirical example regarding country-level differences in corruption.