The Influence of Cultural Distance on Settlement Intention of Floating Population in China

Abstract: Based on a nationwide labour-force survey data, this paper investigates the influence of cultural variance on migrants' settlement intention in China. By using dialectal distance as a proxy for cultural distance, we find strong evidence for the negative effects of cultural distance on migrants' settlement intention. By further investigation into sub-samples separated by gender, generation and higher education experience, we find that the influence is less effective for younger migrants and higher-educated migrants, which indicates that the impact of cultural barrier may gradually diminish with the integration of society and promotion of education.