The Role of Geography and History in Cultural Diffusion: a Gravity Approach
Abstract: By using micro-level data from a household survey in 27 European and central Asian transition countries and Turkey, this paper develops a gravitational approach that allows to empirically investigate the respective roles of local social interactions, proxied by geographic localization data, and of distant history, in particular the influence of former dynastic empires, on the distribution of opinions and on some economic outcomes. The focus is on opinions and economic outcomes for which both vertical and horizontal transmission have been shown or conjectured to play a role, such as: preferences for the welfare state, general trust, corruption, economic occupation and female labor force participation. The theoretical model predicts that cultural distance and dissimilarity of economic outcome will in increase in physical distance. This is confirmed by empirical results. Other results show evidence of significant negative “border effects” on cultural and economic dissimilarity, and a strong negative effect of past empires, as well as of EU integration and internet penetration. The results also indicate that Turkey is quite dissimilar to the new Europe, but not fundamentally different from other EU candidates.
