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The Cost of Migrating to a Culturally Different Location

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  • Oliver Falck
  • Alfred Lameli
  • Jens Ruhose

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Oliver Falck & Alfred Lameli & Jens Ruhose, 2014. "The Cost of Migrating to a Culturally Different Location," CESifo Working Paper Series 4992, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_4992
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    Cited by:

    1. Reinhard A. Weisser, 2019. "The price of mobility," Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft, Springer;Gesellschaft für Regionalforschung (GfR), vol. 39(1), pages 25-64, February.
    2. Annie Tubadji & Peter Nijkamp & Vassilis Angelis, 2016. "Cultural hysteresis, entrepreneurship and economic crisisAn analysis of buffers to unemployment after economic shocks," Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 9(1), pages 103-136.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    migration costs; culture; internal migration; psychic cost;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D51 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Exchange and Production Economies
    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • R23 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population

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