PDF Ebook Local Amenities and Life Cycle Migration: Do People Move for Jobs or Fun?
Do households move for jobs or fun, and where do they go when they move? We address these questions using the 1970-2000 U.S. Census. Based on a panel of quality of life and business environment measures, households prefer MSAs in warm coastal areas and non-metropolitan locations, while firms prefer large, growing cities. In addition, cities with improving business environments acquire increasing shares of workers, especially workers with high levels of human capital; cities with improving consumer amenities become relatively more populated by retirees.
Further analysis of individual level migration decisions indicates that regardless of marital status, young, highly educated households tend to move towards places with higher quality business environments. This tendency is especially pronounced among highly educated couples who are more subject to job market co-location problems. In contrast, regardless of education, couples near retirement tend to move away from places with favorable business environments and towards places with highly valued consumer amenities. These patterns help explain why areas unattractive to both households and business have struggled, as with upstate New York, while the sunbelt and other regions are thriving.
Between 1990 and 2004, upstate New York experienced a 25 percent decline in the number of young adults (ages 25 to 35) with even higher rates of decline among the college educated.1 This dramatic exodus and related “brain drain” undercuts the viability of local economies. Yet, over the same period, other regions of the U.S. have experienced dramatic increases in population, especially in the sun-belt states. Estimates provided later in this paper help to explain why: of 346 regions identified in the United States, the major upstate cities all offer limited appeal to both households and firms, while cities such as Phoenix, San Diego, and Sarasota rank highly.
These shifts in population are also characteristic of a broader phenomenon in the U.S.: the U.S. population is geographically mobile. Between 1995 and 2000, for example, 45.9% of U.S. residents moved at least once. Of these moves, nearly half were to locations outside of the original county. With birth and death rates relatively stable in the U.S., the willingness of households to migrate is a primary driver of regional shifts in the supply of labor and the local level of human capital. Migration can also have profound effects on the age distribution of the population: at the same time that young adults were leaving upstate New York over the last fifteen years, the region’s population of individuals age 45 and over increased by 15 percent. These shifts increase demand for services and housing sought out by older families at the same time that the tax base and quality of the local labor force are compromised. Moreover, challenges of this sort are likely to increase as the Baby Boomers retire, both in Upstate and other “graying” regions of the United States.
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PDF Ebook Local Amenities and Life Cycle Migration: Do People Move for Jobs or Fun?
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