Culture and cross-border commuting

Using unique administrative data on historical dialects, we estimate the effect of cultural dissimilarity on cross-border commuting flows from the Dutch-speaking regions of Belgium (i.e. Flanders and Brussels) to the Netherlands. The results show that economic drivers, specifically the cost of commuting measured by the geographical distance, remain the most important factor defining the distribution of workers across the national borders of Belgium and the Netherlands. Furthermore, we showed that an increase in cultural difference between municipalities by one standard deviation leads to a robust decrease in cross-border commuting flows from Belgium to the Netherlands ranging from 7% to 22%.