Michael J. Greenwood

A CONDITIONAL LOGIT APPROACH TO U.S. STATE-TO-STATE MIGRATION*

This paper uses a conditional logit approach to study interstate migration in the United States for each of eleven years, from 1986–1987 to 1996–1997. We test substantive hypotheses regarding migration in the United States and demonstrate the richness of the conditional logit approach in studies of place‐to‐place migration. We investigate migration responses to relative economic opportunities (unemployment rate, per capita income) and the associated costs of moving (distance between origin and destination and its square). We also investigate how noneconomic factors, such as amenities, affect migration between states through a state fixed effect. Finally, we study the magnitude of unmeasured costs associated with a particular migration. The conditional logit model also allows us to compute various trade‐off and other values that are of interest in migration analysis.

Chapter 12 Internal migration in developed countries

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the concept of migration, selected facts about internal migration in developed countries, and the determinants of migration. In most advanced societies, inter-regional migration is a major mechanism through which labor resources are redistributed geographically, in response to changing economic and demographic forces. The determinants of migration are the factors that affect migration—including characteristics both of places and of persons and their families—while consequences of migration refer both to the performance of migrants in their new locations relative to a benchmark, such as their presumed performance in their former place of residence had they not moved and to the impacts that migrants have on others in sending and receiving areas. The human capital model provides a powerful analytical tool for the study of numerous important issues in labor economics, but this model does not provide a comparably powerful explanation of migration.

The Early History Of Migration Research

This article provides a history of the early contributions to the scientific study of migration. It begins with Ravenstein (1880s) and also features the work of D. S. Thomas (1930s). Moreover, the development of the gravity model as applied to migration research (1930s and 1940s) is discussed. The article discusses the historical reasons for interest in various migration phenomena and briefly treats the development of migration data sources.

New Directions in Migration Research: Perspectives from Some North American Regional Science Disciplines

This paper takes several surveys of the literature concerning migration research as its starting point and directs the reader toward a number of potentially fruitful lines for future research. Major sections include one on modeling migrant choice in which the pros and cons of using gross versus net migration measures are discussed. A second introduces and discusses the concept of a “spatial” choice set, which has the potential to be implemented with laboratory experimental techniques. The third involves a wide-ranging discussion of new directions in modeling the interrelationships between employment and migration.

Differential economic opportunity, transferability of skills, and immigration to the United States and Canada

Studies concerned with U.S. and Canadian immigration after World War II have been on cross-sectional data or on limited time series data and have stressed the importance of differential economic opportunity as a cause of migration. In this study, four vectors of variables are used to explain annual immigration to both the United States and Canada, 1962-84, from a number of specific source countries--economic opportunities, transferability of skills, level of economic development and political conditions, and institutional controls that reflect the immigration policies of the two nations. Wage differentials, several measures of skill transferability, political conditions in source countries, and the policy variables prove to be important determinants of U.S. and Canadian immigration. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.

Long-Term Trends In Migratory Behavior In A Developing Country: The Case of Mexico

Comparable lifetime migration relationships are estimated for Mexico for 1950, 1960, and 1970. Moreover, migration flows from each state to every other state are separately examined for each year. A number of significant changes over time are evident in the responsiveness of Mexican internal migrants to various socioeconomic stimuli, and appreciable differences are also evident across space. Moreover, a threshold is observed such that up to about 340 miles higher origin earnings deter migration, but beyond this distance higher earnings actually encourage migration.

The factor-market consequences of unskilled immigration to the United States

Abstract This paper applies the production-theory approach to migration to assess the wage and employment effects of unskilled immigration to the United States. Native labour and foreign-born labour are disaggregated into four skill categories. Together with capital, this adds up to nine inputs. The data are cross section for 121 metropolitan areas. Both an aggregate cost function and a production function are estimated. The functional form that we use is the Symmetric Normalized Quadratic Semiflexible function. Special attention is devoted to required curvature conditions which have frequently been violated in previous work. Elasticity estimates are reported for alternative settings, including for the short run when we view domestic factor prices as given and the long run when we treat them as flexible. The results indicate that an increase of unskilled immigration has a small - but statistically significant - negative effect on low- and medium-skill native workers.

The regional labor market adjustment process: determinants of changes in rates of labor force participation, unemployment, and migration.

This paper employs a simultaneous-equations model to examine the regional labor market adjustment process for a sample of United States counties over the 1960–1970 period. The interaction between employment change and migration is well known, but that between employment change and labor force participation has been largely neglected. Labor force participation response, especially among women, is shown to be an important endogenous element in the labor market adjustment process. Important asymmetries are also evident between growing and declining regions, and these asymmetries suggest that the well-established link between employment and migration may have more force in growing than in declining areas.

Metropolitan Growth and the Intrametropolitan Location of Employment, Housing, and Labor Force

The present study recognizes that households might change location not only in response to changes in workplace but also in response to changes in housing supply conditions. Furthermore it recognizes that household location decisions might in turn influence the distribution of employment and housing across metropolitan space. The study thus develops a simultaneous-equations model of urban growth and intraurban location that treats housing employment and labor force location within the same framework. (excerpt)

Conducting Descriptive and Analytical Research with the Immigration and Naturalization Service Public Use Tapes

For many years the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has published annual data on persons admitted to the U.S. as legal resident aliens. Only relatively recently has INS begun to make its microdata files available. This paper concerns the INS Public Use Tapes including a detailed description of the information available on them an account of the frequency and severity of certain flaws in the data and a discussion of possible methods for correcting these flaws. The paper also discusses a number of strengths and [weaknesses] of the data for descriptive and analytical research and it provides several suggestions for research projects that could be carried out with the INS data. (EXCERPT)