Dialects, Cultural Identity, and Economic Exchange
By Oliver Falck, Stephan Heblich, Alfred Lameli, Jens Suedekum. Social Science Research Network, 2012
364 citations recorded by the source corpus.
It has long been argued that economic phenomena are affected by culture. However, the causal effect of cultural ties on economic exchange is difficult to identify, chiefly because cultural ties are endogenous to the current level of economic exchange, and because it is hard to separate culture from other influences. In this paper, we address these issues by using a novel measure for cultural identity�historical dialect differences across regions of the same country. We evaluate linguistic micro-data from a unique language survey conducted between 1879 and 1888 in about 45,000 German schools. The recorded geography of dialects comprehensively reflects local cultural differences that have been evolving for centuries and provides an ideal opportunity to isolate cultural costs from other barriers to economic exchange. In a gravity analysis, we then show that cross-regional migration flows in the period 2000�2006 are positively affected by historical dialect similarity, a finding that indicates highly time-persistent cultural borders that impede economic exchange even at a fine geographical scale.
Subfields: Cultural Studies, Demography, Language and Linguistics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e654bfdabcdbbb869cc846b9e98cb12c37a4c46
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cultural Studies
In Demography
- Michael Wyrwich
- David B. Audretsch
- Michael Stuetzer
- M. Obschonka
- Stephan Heblich
- Oliver Falck
- Stefan Bauernschuster
- Jens Suedekum
In Language and Linguistics
Citations in the corpus
- Why are Educated and Risk-Loving Persons More Mobile Across Regions? (2012, methodology): “The related approach by Falck et al. (2012) shows that cultural barriers to economic exchange also exist on a much finer geographically level, namely across regions of the same country.”
- Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP (2022, background): “, 2020), which in turn operate as an important sign of cultural identity (Falck et al., 2012).”
- Industry structure, entrepreneurship, and culture: An empirical analysis using historical coalfields (2016, background): “A region’s soil quality is measured with a dummy variable indicating any limits to agricultural use (e.g., gravelly, lithic, or sodic soil; see for a similar approach Falck et al., 2012).”
- The causal impact of common native language on international trade: Evidence from a spatial regression discontinuity design: evidence from a spatial regression discontinuity design (2015, neutral): “For an estimation of the impact of native language on trade one would ideally use data which allow for an isolation of the nativeness from the spokenness and officialness of common language (see Falck et al., 2012, for such an approach in the context of dialects).”