Laboratory

Migration and Mobility

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Measuring and Modeling Cultural Distance between Countries and its Relationship with Migration Patterns

Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Emilio Zagheni; in Collaboration with Lohmann Sophie (IREES GmbH, Germany), Filipe Nunes Ribeiro (Federal University of Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil), Pedro Olmo Stancioli Vaz de Melo, Fabrício Benevenuto (both: Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil)

We study the global diffusion of cultural taste, evaluating the preferences of Facebook users through the Facebook advertisement platform. Our research develops new measures of cultural distance that can be incorporated in gravity models of migration and theories of remote acculturation.  Detailed Description

Asymmetric Cultural Similarity. Each cell corresponds to the Cultural Similarity measured by the cosine similarity between the country in the row and the country in the column. The countries are represented via a vector of 50 dimensions considering the top 50 food and drink preferred by the Facebook users living in the country in the row. © MPIDR; Source: COIMBRA VIEIRA, C.; LOHMANN, S.; ZAGHENI, E.; VAZ DE MELO, P. O. S.; BENEVENUTO, F.; RIBEIRO, F. N.: The interplay of migration and cultural similarity between countries: evidence from Facebook data on food and drink interests. PLoS One 17:2, e0262947-e0262947 (2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0262947

Publications

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Lohmann, S.; Zagheni, E.:

The value of cultural similarity for predicting migration: evidence from digital trace data

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2023-009. (2023)    

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Lohmann, S.; Zagheni, E.; Vaz de Melo, P. O. S.; Benevenuto, F.; Ribeiro, F. N.:

The interplay of migration and cultural similarity between countries: evidence from Facebook data on food and drink interests

PLoS One 17:2, e0262947–e0262947. (2022)    

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Ribeiro, F. N.; Vaz de Melo, P. O. S.; Benevenuto, F.; Zagheni, E.:

Using Facebook data to measure cultural distance between countries: the case of Brazilian cuisine

In: WWW '20: proceedings of the Web Conference 2020; Apr 20-25, 2020, Taipei, Taiwan, 3091–3097. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). (2020)