This paper investigates whether individuals’ cultural background affects their housing investment decisions, drawing inferences from property location choices, and transaction prices in Australia. We propose a novel measure of cultural distance for each homebuyer–neighborhood pair, adopting the six‐dimensional cultural framework of Hofstede. Our measure captures interethnicity similarity and thus measures the cultural similarity of each buyer and neighborhood pair at a more granular level. Utilizing housing transaction data of a culturally diverse city Sydney, Australia, we find that buyers are more likely to buy properties in neighborhoods with a shorter cultural distance to their culture of origin and are willing to pay a premium for properties in those locations, consistent with buyers’ preference for cultural proximity. Further, we show that cultural proximity preference is stronger for ethnicities from recent migration waves, particularly Asia. Our findings are generalizable to other regions with ethnic aggregations and offer new insights into the growing literature on culture and household finance as well as the urban economics literature.

中文翻译：

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熔锅或色拉碗：文化距离和住房投资

本文调查了个人的文化背景是否会影响他们的住房投资决策，并从房地产位置选择和澳大利亚的交易价格中得出了推论。我们采用霍夫斯泰德（Hofstede）的六维文化框架，为每个购房者-邻居提出了一种新的文化距离度量。我们的措施可以捕捉种族间的相似性，从而在更细化的层面上衡量每个购买者和邻居对的文化相似性。利用澳大利亚悉尼一个文化多元的城市的房屋交易数据，我们发现购房者更有可能在与其原籍文化距离较近的社区购买房产，并愿意为那些地点的房产支付溢价，这与购买者对文化接近度的偏好。进一步，我们表明，最近的移民浪潮（尤其是亚洲）对族裔的文化接近偏好更高。我们的发现可推广到其他具有种族聚集的地区，并为日益增长的文化和家庭金融文献以及城市经济学文献提供新见解。