Cultural Similarities Predict Migration over and above Shared Location, Shared Language, and Shared History

Carolina Coimbra Vieira , Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)
Sophie Lohmann , Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)
Emilio Zagheni , Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)

One of the strongest empirical regularities in spatial demography is that flows of migrants are positively associated with population stocks at origin and destination, and inversely related to distance. This pattern, observed in the 19th century, was formalized into what are known as gravity models of migration. Traditionally, distance is measured geographically, however, other measurements including economic and cultural factors have also been found to be relevant to explaining migration flows. In particular, we believe that cultural distance may be one important form of distance to explain migration flows because it is dynamic. In this paper, we propose a scalable approach to obtain proxies for cultural similarity across countries by using data from the Facebook Advertising Platform. Our results show that our new measure of cultural similarity adds over and above standard predictors in predicting migration, opening new opportunities to understand determinants of migration.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe