The effect of cultural origin on COVID-19 infection rates

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural origin
• language
• civic capital
• COVID-19

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• Z1
• D91

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ See Lee et al. (2020) for an overview of how the pandemic has spread.

² With reference to the example in Chen (2013), 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.

⁴ https://astat.provincia.bz.it/it/default.asp

⁵ https://www.asdaa.it/it/covid-19.asp

⁶ https://www.finanze.gov.it

⁷ https://dait.interno.gov.it/elezioni/open-data

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.