In the last few weeks, I’ve had several questions about declining long-distance migration in the US, both on twitter and IRL. \Thread with what my co-authors and I think is going on… 1/n
2/n. While it’s generally true that the decline in migration since (at least) 1980 is not well explained, RMolly, CSmith and I attribute this to declines in labor market transitions.
3/n. Why do we think this?
We lay this out in our 2017 Demography Paper. Ungated link:
awozniak.nd.edu/assets/210453/…
Several facts point us in this direction.
We lay this out in our 2017 Demography Paper. Ungated link:
awozniak.nd.edu/assets/210453/…
Several facts point us in this direction.
4/n. Fact 1: Declines in measures of job change “explain” a large share of declines in migration at the state level (about half).
5/n. Fact 2: As we write, “the relative magnitude of the populations involved suggests that the causality runs from job transitions to migration.”
6/n. Fact 3: Labor market transitions have declined even among individuals who did not change their state of residence.
7/n. Fact 4: Although the migration decline is broad-based, it is more pronounced among individuals that participated in the labor force around the time of migration. (Fig 6 of the paper)
8/n. We conclude that the decline in migration is likely an ancillary symptom of the decline in labor market turnover. We try to explain *that* in our BPEA2016 paper, but more work remains to be done here.
We’ll keep working…
@dkopf @graykimbrough @samh510 @dhsandler
We’ll keep working…
@dkopf @graykimbrough @samh510 @dhsandler
