Globalization, cultural distance, and cultural convergence: some new evidence

A small but growing literature has explored the impact of global socio-economic integration on cross-country cultural differences. This paper presents new empirical estimates of the effect of economic and social globalization on cultural distances across countries and time. In a sample of up to 49 countries and 1,163 unique country-pairs, we find that economic globalization, capturing trade and capital flows, is significantly associated with increases in cultural distance across countries, while social globalization is associated with decreases. Interestingly, globalization has little impact on cultural distances on net. The findings are robust to a large number of historical, institutional, and geographic controls.