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Title: Those Who Stayed: Selection and Cultural Change in the Age of Mass Migration

Citation Type: Working Paper

Publication Year: 2021

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Abstract: This paper studies the cultural determinants and consequences of mass emigration from Scandinavia to North America in the 19th century. I test the hypothesis that people with collectivist traits tended to stay rather than emigrate because they faced higher costs of leaving familiar social networks behind. Exploiting near-complete data on 1.5 million emigrants and 10 million stayers in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, I find that children who grew up in households that practiced stronger collectivist norms were less likely to emigrate later in life. I proceed to document that this type of selective emigration generated lasting cultural change in migrant-sending locations. Locations that experienced larger outflows of particularly selected individuals are thus more collectivist today. The implications of these findings are potentially wide-reaching as collectivism and its counterpart, individualism, have been linked to central societal processes such as cooperation, the diffusion of ideas, and innovation.

Url: https://annesofiebeckknudsen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/thosewhostayed.pdf

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Authors: Knudsen, Anne Sofie Beck

Series Title: Department of Economics

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Institution: University of Copenhagen

Pages: 1-68

Publisher Location: Copenhagen

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Migration and Immigration

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