European inventory of
societal values of culture

» NEW! » Rapoport, Sardoschau & Silve - Migration and Cultural Change

 Rapoport, Hillel and Sardoschau, Sulin and Silve, Arthur, Migration and Cultural Change (2020). CESifo Working Paper No. 8547, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3689469 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3689469 

The authors examine both theoretically and empirically how migration affects cultural change in home and host countries. Their theoretical model integrates various compositional and cultural transmission mechanisms of migration-based cultural change for which it delivers distinctive testable predictions on the sign and direction of convergence. They then use the World Value Survey for the period 1981-2014 to build time-varying measures of cultural similarity for a large number of country pairs and exploit within country-pair variation over time. The evidence is inconsistent with the view that immigrants are a threat to the host country’s culture. While migrants do act as vectors of cultural diffusion and bring about cultural convergence, this is mostly to disseminate cultural values and norms from host to home countries (i.e., cultural remittances).