This paper establishes a robust relationship between idea flows across countries, as captured by book translations, and two measures of population relatedness. I argue that linguistic distance imposes a cost on idea flows, whereas genetic distance captures an incentive to communicate when dissimilar countries have more to learn from each other. Consistent with this hypothesis, I find that linguistic distance is negatively associated with book translations, whereas genetic distance is positively associated with book translations after conditioning on linguistic and geographic distance. In particular, the benchmark estimate indicates that a one standard deviation increase in linguistic distance reduces book translations by 12%, while a one standard deviation increase in genetic distance increases book translations by 10%.

中文翻译：

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人口相关性和跨国思想流动：书籍翻译的证据

本文建立了跨国家的思想流动（如书籍翻译所捕获的）与人口相关性的两种度量之间的稳固关系。我认为语言距离会给思想流带来成本，而遗传距离会在不同国家之间需要相互学习的时候激励人们进行交流。与此假设相符，我发现语言距离与书籍翻译成负相关，而遗传距离与语言翻译和地理距离成正比则与书籍翻译成正相关。特别是，基准估算表明，语言距离的一个标准偏差增加会使书籍翻译减少12％，而遗传距离的一个标准偏差增加会使书籍翻译增加10％。