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Title: Linguistic and Cultural Assimilation as a Human Capital Process
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2017
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Abstract: I develop a learning-by-doing theory of cultural assimilation, in which an individual's cultural identity is determined by past investments in culture-specific social capital. The model incorporates several empirically relevant aspects of assimilation that have been difficult to explain in past models. The mechanism in my model yields two possible qualitative outcomes of the assimilation process, depending on the in-tertemporal complementarities of investment. The first, in which individuals become more homogeneous over time, has been used to explain immigrants' wage assimilation. The second, in which individuals become more heterogeneous as some assimilate and some do not, has vastly different implications for immigration and integration policies. Using detailed datasets from three immigrant destination countries, I provide a variety of evidence from linguistic, identity, and religiosity measures that cultural assimilation (in contrast to economic assimilation) most closely resembles the second type of process. * Many thanks to
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Authors: Marrone, James
Publisher: University of Chicago
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Other
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