Culture, spatial diffusion of ideas and their long-lasting imprints--evidence from Froebel's kindergarten movement
研究了19世纪德国福禄贝尔幼儿园的空间扩散，发现文化邻近性（以历史方言相似度衡量）是早期扩散的关键因素，且这种文化影响至今仍体现在当代儿童保育覆盖率的空间分布上。
We document the spatial diffusion of Friedrich Froebel’s radical invention of kindergartens in 19th-century Germany. The first kindergarten was founded at Froebel’s birthplace. Early spatial diffusion can be explained by cultural proximity, measured by historical dialect similarity, to Froebel’s birthplace. This result is robust to the inclusion of higher order polynomials in geographic distance and similarity measures with respect to industry, geography or religion. Our findings suggest that a common cultural basis facilitates the spill-over of ideas. We further show that the contemporaneous spatial pattern of child care coverage is still correlated with cultural similarity to Froebel’s place of birth.