Aix Marseille University, CNRS, Aix Marseille School of Economics (AMSE), Marseille, France.
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Geneva, Switzerland.
Soc Sci Med. 2022 May;301:114886. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.114886. Epub 2022 Mar 15.
Despite its universal nature, the impact of COVID-19 has not been geographically homogeneous. While certain countries and regions have been severely affected, registering record infection rates and excess deaths, others experienced only milder outbreaks. We investigate to what extent human factors, in particular cultural origins reflected in different attitudes and behavioural norms, can explain different degrees of exposure to the virus. Motivated by the linguistic relativity hypothesis, we take language as a proxy for cultural origins and exploit the exogenous variation in the language spoken around the border that divides the French- and German-speaking parts of Switzerland to estimate the impact of culture on exposure to COVID-19. The results obtained using a spatial regression discontinuity design reveal, that within 50- and 25- kilometres bandwidth from the language border, the average COVID-19 exposure levels for individuals in French speaking municipalities was higher. In particular, we find that German speaking municipalities were associated with a reduction of around 40% - 50% in the odds of COVID-19 exposure compared to the French speaking municipalities.
尽管 COVID-19 具有普遍性，但它的影响在地理上并不均匀。虽然某些国家和地区受到了严重影响，创下了创纪录的感染率和超额死亡率，而其他地区的疫情则较为温和。我们研究了人类因素，特别是反映在不同态度和行为规范中的文化渊源，在多大程度上可以解释接触病毒的程度不同。受语言相对论假说的启发，我们将语言作为文化渊源的代表，并利用瑞士法语区和德语区之间边界周围语言的外生变化来估计文化对接触 COVID-19 的影响。使用空间回归不连续性设计得到的结果表明，在距语言边界 50 公里和 25 公里的带宽内，说法语的城市的个体的 COVID-19 暴露水平更高。特别是，我们发现与说法语的城市相比，讲德语的城市接触 COVID-19 的几率降低了约 40%-50%。
