Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/103089 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 4992
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
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.
Subjects: 
migration costs
culture
internal migration
psychic cost
JEL: 
D51
J61
R23
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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