Over the past century, societies worldwide have undergone major demographic shifts driven by technological change, economic development, evolving social norms, and expanding civil rights. A central feature of these transformations is the global trend toward smaller household sizes.

Using census-based data on household sizes across 159 countries, Tobias Grohmann will examine in this seminar how this trend affects international migration during 1990-2020. Beyond using average household size at origin as an indicator of demographic and socio-cultural change, he also developed a new dynamic measure of socio-cultural similarity between countries based on the distribution of household sizes.

Following empirical practices developed in the international trade literature, the speaker will explain how he estimated a structural gravity model with origin-year, destination-year, and corridor fixed effects, as well as domestic flows.

During the session, Tobias Grohmann will present four main emerging findings: first, smaller household sizes at origin—reflecting more individualistic socio-cultural arrangements—are consistently associated with larger international migration flows. This aligns with the Voluntary Settlement Hypothesis. Second, contrary to expectations, he finds no consistent evidence that greater average socio-cultural similarity between origin and destination increases international migration. Third, the relationship between origin household size and migration shows only weak nonlinearity. This offers only limited support for the so-called Mobility Transition Hypothesis. Fourth, interactions reveal that similarity reduces migration from individualistic (small household) societies but may increase it from more collectivistic (large household) societies, indicating a stronger role for cultural fit in the latter.

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