Why are Educated and Risk-Loving Persons More Mobile Across Regions?

Why are better educated and more risk-friendly persons more mobile across regions? To answer this question, we use micro data on internal migrants from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 2000-2006 and merge this information with a unique proxy for region-pair-specific cultural distances across German regions constructed from historical local dialect patterns. Our findings indicate that risk-loving and skilled people are more mobile over longer distances because they are more willing to cross cultural boundaries and move to regions that are culturally different from their homes. Other types of distance-related migration costs cannot explain the lower distance sensitivity of educated and risk-loving individuals.

[1]  Gordon B. Dahl.  MOBILITY AND THE RETURN TO EDUCATION: TESTING A ROY MODEL WITH MULTIPLE MARKETS , 2002 .

[2]  S. Michalopoulos.  The Origins of Ethnolinguistic Diversity. , 2012, The American economic review.

[3]  J. Hunt,et al.  Are Migrants More Skilled than Non-Migrants? Repeat, Return, and Same-Employer Migrants , 2004 .

[4]  A. Schwartz,et al.  Interpreting the Effect of Distance on Migration , 1973, Journal of Political Economy.

[5]  Torben Stühmeier,et al.  Access regulation with asymmetric termination costs , 2013 .

[6]  Farid Toubal,et al.  Cultural Proximity and Trade , 2006 .

[7]  Alfred Lameli,et al.  Dialects, Cultural Identity, and Economic Exchange , 2010, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[8]  S. Machin,et al.  Education and Mobility , 2012, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[9]  Christopher L. Smith,et al.  Internal Migration in the United States , 2011, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[10]  Klaus Gugler,et al.  How Effective is European Merger Control , 2011 .

[11]  David A. Jaeger,et al.  Direct Evidence on Risk Attitudes and Migration , 2007, The Review of Economics and Statistics.

[12]  Ulrich Schwalbe,et al.  Economic principles of state aid control , 2011 .

[13]  Jacques Melitz,et al.  Language and Foreign Trade , 2002 .

[14]  Ofer Malamud,et al.  The Impact of College on Migration , 2012, The Journal of Human Resources.

[15]  Gert G. Wagner,et al.  The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) - Scope, Evolution and Enhancements , 2007, Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch.

[16]  Jeffrey T. Grogger,et al.  Speech Patterns and Racial Wage Inequality , 2008, The Journal of Human Resources.

[17]  Mehmet Karaçuka,et al.  The bank lending channel in Turkey: has it changed after the low-inflation regime? , 2012 .

[18]  L. Cavalli-Sforza.  Genes, peoples and languages. , 1991, Scientific American.

[19]  David C. Maré,et al.  Cities and Skills , 1994, Journal of Labor Economics.

[20]  How Many Languages Do We Need?: The Economics of Linguistic Diversity , 2011 .

[21]  John Gibson,et al.  Eight Questions About Brain Drain , 2011, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[22]  G. Peri.  Young workers, learning, and agglomerations , 2002 .

[23]  G. Tabellini,et al.  Institutions and Culture , 2007 .

[24]  L. Sjaastad.  The Costs and Returns of Human Migration , 1962 .