English
Valencià
Resumen
This paper studies whether growing up in an ethnic enclave slows down immigrants’ cultural assimilation. To identify neighbourhood influence, I exploit the random allocation of asylum seekers to government housing in the Netherlands between 1996 and 2012. To assess assimilation, I examine a culturally charged consumption: the usage of hormonal contraceptives by teenage women. Using individual level administrative data on drug usage, I find that cultural assimilation is slow and cannot be accelerated by limiting the formation of ethnic enclaves. Using machine learning techniques, I do not find evidence that this baseline result hides heterogeneous effects on a relevant sub-population.
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