Mauro Lanati (p), Alessandra Venturini

Gabriele Wydra-Somaggio

Cultural differences play an important role in shaping migration patterns. The conventional proxies
for cross country cultural differences - such as common language, ethnicity, genetic traits or
religion - implicitly assume that cultural proximity between two countries is constant over time and
symmetric, which is far from realistic. This paper proposes a tractable model for international
migration which explicitly allows for the time varying and asymmetric dimensions of cultural
proximity. Similarly to Disdier et al (2010) we assume that the evolution of bilateral cultural
affinity over time is reflected in the intensity of bilateral trade in cultural goods. Our empirical
framework includes a comprehensive set of high dimensional fixed effects which enables for the
identification of the impact of cultural proximity on migration over and beyond the effect of preexisting
cultural and historical ties. The results are robust across different econometric techniques
and suggest that positive changes in cultural relationships over time foster bilateral migration.

Annekatrin Niebuhr (p), Moritz Meister

Mauro Lanati

We investigate ethnic segregation in German cities based on geocoded data. The analysis takes into account some important measurement issues such as the modifiable areal unit problem and spatial autocorrelation. Our results point to a significant variation in ethnic segregation across cities. Urban areas in the south-west of the country tend to show a moderate degree of segregation whereas cities in East Germany and the Ruhr area are characterized by relatively high levels of segregation if we apply the most common segregation measure, the dissimilarity index. The ranking of cities is, however, sensitive to the assumptions regarding reallocation of population across neighborhoods that the use of different segregation measures involve. Moreover, the findings suggest that standard approaches tend to underrate the degree of segregation because they ignore the spatial clustering of ethnic groups. We also analyse the relationship between the degree of ethnic segregation and some basic features of cities. Preliminary results indicate that segregation increases with city size while evidence with respect to the demographic composition is ambiguous.

Gabriele Wydra-Somaggio (p), Anne Otto

Annekatrin Niebuhr

see extended abstract