The Role of Cultural Clustering in Attracting New Immigrants* by

This paper argues that new immigrants cluster in culturally homogenous groups in the host country because of imperfect information. However, the pulling-effect exists provided that the cultural communities are not too large. With a panel of migration flows to the major OECD countries from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, it is shown that the existence of similar cultural communities does attract new immigrants. The effect is, however, not homogenous for all types of source and destination countries. Also, the pulling effect is shown to fall to zero beyond some threshold size of the cultural community. JEL Classification Numbers: F22, J61, O15.