Culture as a Habit: Assimilation and Language Learning Over the Lifecycle

I develop a model to explain many empirical facts about cultural assimilation and cultural change, and to make new empirically-relevant predictions about the efficiency of assimilation trajectories and the investments people make before and after migration. The model conceptualizes cultural assimilation as the accumulation of culture-specific capital and a choice between different production functions. Learning-by-doing influences productivity, and generates stickiness in cultural change over time. The model predicts several empirical intraand inter-generational patterns of immigrant assimilation; in particular, the model rationalizes assimilation in terms of traditional incomeand substitution-effect tradeoffs. I examine some of the empirical predictions of the model using data from the New Immigrant Survey, which documents individuals’ complete migration profiles.