Citation

Discussion Paper Details

Please find the details for DP10644 in an easy to copy and paste format below:

Full Details

Title: Ancestry, Language and Culture

Author(s): Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg

Publication Date: June 2015

Keyword(s): Ancestry, Barriers, Cladistics, Cultural distance, Genetic distance, Linguistic distance, Religious distance and World Values Survey

Programme Area(s): International Trade and Regional Economics

Abstract: We explore the interrelationships between various measures of cultural distance. We ?first discuss measures of genetic distance, used in the recent economics literature to capture the degree of relatedness between countries. We next describe several classes of measures of linguistic, religious, and cultural distances. We introduce new measures of cultural distance based on differences in average answers to questions from the World Values Survey. Using a simple theoretical model we hypothesize that ancestral distance, measured by genetic distance, is positively correlated with linguistic, religious, and cultural distance. An empirical exploration of these correlations shows this to be the case. This empirical evidence is consistent with the view that genetic distance is a summary statistic for a wide array of cultural traits transmitted intergenerationally.

For full details and related downloads, please visit: https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=10644

Bibliographic Reference

Spolaore, E and Wacziarg, R. 2015. 'Ancestry, Language and Culture'. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research. https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=10644