266
Views
0
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Research Article

The effect of cultural origin on COVID-19 infection rates

ORCID Icon, & ORCID Icon
 

ABSTRACT

We examine whether a community’s cultural origin affects COVID-19 infection rates by exploiting cultural differences in the bilingual province of South Tyrol in Northern Italy. We find lower infection rates in municipalities with a relatively higher proportion of German speakers, even after controlling for widely used measures of social and civic capital. Our findings can be explained by a more future-oriented behaviour of German speakers in comparison with Italian speakers.

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Lee et al. (Citation2020) for an overview of how the pandemic has spread.

2 With reference to the example in Chen (Citation2013), the sentence ‘It will rain tomorrow’ can be naturally translated in German using the present tense as ‘Morgen regnet es’, i.e. ‘It rains tomorrow’. By contrast, in Italian, like in English, the sentence requires the use of the future tense, i.e. ‘Domani pioverà’.

3 With ‘Germanic culture’ (‘Italian culture’) we refer to people who speak German (Italian) as mother tongue.

8 Similar results (available upon request) are found when using the number of non-profit organizations over total residents in place of the proportion of volunteers.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.