Gravity Effects of Culture, Institutions and Religion in Brazil

Daisy Lima , Catholic University of Brasilia
Philipp Ehrl, Catholic University of Brasilia

The present paper evaluates the dynamics of the influx of the mass internal migration at the Brazilian counties using a gravity model. This paper will conduct an empirical analysis of the role of cultural, institutional and religion distance in migration inflow of Brazilian population using traditional gravity models in international economics accounting for the omitted variables and endogeneity issues. Origin and destination cities are characterized by intrinsic differences in culture, institutions and religion. We confirm some expectations about the explanatory power of variables as individual trust, community trust, market orientation, proud being Brazilian, satisfaction with life, freedom politic, corruption, disciplinaded person, intention of migrate to another country, critical person and religion diversity for the movement of people in Brazilian counties. For this, we employ data of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) survey beyond the Brazilian Census at 2010 year considering that the original place is the born county of the individuals. Others databases we chose in the survey of IBGE, Anuario Estatistico do Brasil. And we integrate these databases to cultural, institutional and religious variables at the 2010 year from LAPOP database. Then we analyze the push and pull factors of internal migration with the background of the gravitational model applying for this a Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood with Fixed Effects (PPMLFE). At the moment, in this field of literature, the act of not considering the cultural, institutional and religion distances are accounting for omitting variables that otherwise bias the coeficiente of migration flux.

See paper

 Presented in Session P3. Poster Session Migration, Economics, Environment, Methods, History and Policy