Understanding the Long-Run Decline in Interstate Migration / Greg Kaplan, Sam Schulhofer-Wohl.
Material type:![Text](/opac-tmpl/lib/famfamfam/BK.png)
- D83 - Search • Learning • Information and Knowledge • Communication • Belief • Unawareness
- J11 - Demographic Trends, Macroeconomic Effects, and Forecasts
- J24 - Human Capital • Skills • Occupational Choice • Labor Productivity
- J61 - Geographic Labor Mobility • Immigrant Workers
- R12 - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity
- R23 - Regional Migration • Regional Labor Markets • Population • Neighborhood Characteristics
- Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Working Paper | Biblioteca Digital | Colección NBER | nber w18507 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Not For Loan |
November 2012.
We analyze the secular decline in interstate migration in the United States between 1991 and 2011. Gross flows of people across states are about 10 times larger than net flows, yet have declined by around 50 percent over the past 20 years. We argue that the fall in migration is due to a decline in the geographic specificity of returns to occupations, together with an increase in workers' ability to learn about other locations before moving there, through information technology and inexpensive travel. These explanations find support in micro data on the distribution of earnings and occupations across space and on rates of repeat migration. Other explanations, including compositional changes, regional changes, and the rise in real incomes, do not fit the data. We develop a model to formalize the geographic-specificity and information mechanisms and show that a calibrated version is consistent with cross-sectional and time-series patterns of migration, occupations, and incomes. Our mechanisms can explain at least one-third and possibly all of the decline in gross migration since 1991.
Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Print version record
There are no comments on this title.