2024-2025 Domestic Migration Job Market Papers
As noted in the previous post: I’ve gathered all1 the migration-related job market papers from the top 100 economics departments (as ranked by RePEc).
This post continues the previous post (on international migration) with all of the job market papers on domestic migration. They are sorted by modern day/historical, country studied, and then alphabetized by author.
I’ve tried to include as many papers as I’ve found; if I’ve missed your paper; please email me at lagilbert@gmail.com!
Domestic Migration Job Market Papers
Here is a list of titles; abstracts and links are below.
Housing Price, Internal Migration, and Intergenerational Mobility
Internal Migration Restrictions, Aggregate Productivity, and Spatial Growth
Parental Rural-Urban Migration and Child Education
Internal Displacement and Conflict in Ethiopia
Migration, Networks, and Religious Choice
Human Capital of Children from Short-Term Migrant Families in India
Language Barriers, Internal Migration, and Labor Markets in General Equilibrium
Farming, Non-Farm Enterprises, and Migration under Incomplete Markets
Overcoming Migration Barriers: The Impact of an Income Smoothing Program for Kenyan Migrants
Escape the Heat: The Dynamics of Migration as Adaptation to Climate Change
Spatial Labor Market Power in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Roles of Self-Employment and Migration
Coworker Networks and Internal Migration in the United States: Evidence from US Administrative Data
Migration as Climate Adaptation: Evidence from California Wildfires
Reshaping Partition into Partnership: Forced Diversity and Development in Rural China
Coercive Growth: Forced Resettlement and Ethnicity-Based Agglomeration
Ethnic Proximity and Politics: Evidence from Colonial Resettlement in Malaysia
Networks and Geographic Mobility: Evidence from World War II Navy Ships
Time to Accumulate: The Great Migration and the Rise of the American South
Modern Day
China
Housing Price, Internal Migration, and Intergenerational Mobility
Qingyuan Chai (Boston University)
This paper examines the role of housing affordability in shaping intergenerational mobility by affecting internal migration in China. It further explores how housing policies might address the challenges that rising housing costs pose for social mobility and inequality. To address the endogeneity of housing prices, I employ an instrumental variables approach, exploiting the Housing Purchase Restriction policy as a natural experiment. This policy limited the number of properties households could purchase in selected prefectures, thereby creating quasi-exogenous variation in housing price growth. I find that higher destination housing costs deter migration, with a more pronounced effect on individuals from disadvantaged families. As a result, these individuals earn lower incomes than their counterparts from more affluent backgrounds. Therefore, higher housing costs reduce intergenerational mobility. Furthermore, to distinguish among destinations and evaluate the effects of various housing policies, I adopt a structural approach to complement the aggregate-level reduced-form results. Unlike the reduced-form analysis, the structural approach reveals that the impact varies across different destinations. Rent subsidies in megacities primarily increase migration among advantaged individuals than disadvantaged ones, thereby exacerbating income disparities. Conversely, policies targeting disadvantaged groups or offering non-targeted subsidies in non-megacities help increase migration for disadvantaged people and raise intergenerational mobility.
Internal Migration Restrictions, Aggregate Productivity, and Spatial Growth
Yanbin (Tracy) Xu (Georgetown)
This paper investigates the impact of China’s hukou system on internal migration, aggregate productivity, and spatial economic growth using a dynamic spatial equilibrium model. The hukou system, a household registration policy, imposes varying degrees of restrictions on labor mobility across regions, leading to a mismatch between labor supply and demand across regions. By incorporating institutional mobility frictions into a spatial economic framework, this research quantifies the effects of hukou constraints on the spatial distribution of labor, productivity, and output and explores the potential long-term economic growth resulting from spatial redistribution. The model is calibrated using data from Chinese prefectures spanning 1990 to 2020, allowing for a comparison of simulated outcomes with observed economic and demographic trends. The findings indicate that the hukou system dampens mobility by about 36% and results in long-term productivity loss of approximately 17.38% and a welfare reduction of about 106.9%. The abolition of the hukou system is projected to increase aggregate real output. However, the transition is marked by initial declines in welfare, highlighting the short-term challenges associated with such a reform. The analysis further reveals the heterogeneous effects of hukou abolition across regions, underscoring the importance of complementary policies to fully realize the potential benefits of reform.
Parental Rural-Urban Migration and Child Education
Conghan Zheng (Barcelona School of Economics)
Household migration involves both parental and child location choices, which raises more issues of selectivity and endogeneity. Sending children to different locations determines the quality of schooling and parent-child separation. A nested discrete choice model is developed that incorporates the expected returns to children’s education as part of the parents’ migration decision. Estimation results using panel data of Chinese rural households show that the impact of parental internal migration on children’s education differs by children’s stage of education. Policies on the destination side of migration have the greatest impact on households with primary school-age children, while parents of middle school-age children are the group most motivated to migrate for better educational opportunities for their children. And high school-age children are the group most sensitive to budget constraints, with parents having the lowest substitution between education and migration resources within the household budget. The results also suggest that migration frictions are not effective in controlling rural-urban migration flows as intended.
Ethiopia
Internal Displacement and Conflict in Ethiopia
Anne Krahn (Tufts)
Conflict is often a driving factor behind forced displacement. However, it is less understood whether hosting displaced populations cause further conflict. In this paper, I address this open question focusing on internally displaced people (IDPs) who are displaced but remain within the borders of their own country. I use Difference-in-Differences (DiD) methods to assess the impact of opening IDP settlements on conflict in Ethiopia, a country grappling with significant internal displacement. I find that districts hosting an IDP settlement experience a 4.3 percentage point increase in the probability of conflict compared to those that do not, representing a 205% increase over the control risk of conflict. Importantly, I rule out that this effect is entirely due to population shocks and also that it is simply a continuation of existing conflict, since districts where IDPs are primarily displaced due to climate disasters also experience an increase in risk of conflict after IDP settlements open. The finding that climate-driven displacement also contributes to new conflict poses a policy challenge, as global climate displacement is set to increase in the coming years.
Ghana
Migration, Networks, and Religious Choice
Timothy Hersey (Yale)
Over the last half century, affiliation to Pentecostal denominations has grown rapidly, with this growth concentrated in low income countries. This paper investigates one economic factor influencing this growth - rural-urban migration: religious institutions attract members by serving as hosts for economic and social networks, a service which is especially attractive for migrants into the city. I present new evidence from Ghana to test this hypothesis, using data from the ISSER Northwestern-Yale Panel Survey (GSPS) and a survey of Pentecostal churches in Accra. I construct a series of shift-share instruments for migration, using exposure to price shocks in the mining, construction and manufacturing industries. I find that migration significantly increases Pentecostal affiliation, especially for migrants with few network connections in the city. The process of migration also has implications for village networks. I find that out-migration induces conversion for households at the origin. I present evidence consistent with the story that out-migrant households convert in response to weakening ties with the village network.
India
Human Capital of Children from Short-Term Migrant Families in India
Leena Bhattacharya (Tilburg University)
Short-term or seasonal migration is a primary livelihood strategy for poor households in rural areas, driven by seasonal income fluctuations. There are over 10 million short-term migrants in India but the effect of migration on the education of children from these families remains under-researched. Using the large-scale nationally representative India Human Development Survey 2011-12 data, I examine the effect of short-term migration of household members on the literacy and numeracy skills of children from these families in rural India. Instrumental variable (IV) estimates show that children from short-term migrant families acquire lower levels of language and mathematics skills than children from non-migrant families. Next, I use data from a unique primary survey from Odisha, a relatively poor and high out-migration-prone state in Eastern India, in 2019. I examine children’s performance in language and mathematics, in terms of percentile ranks, and its association with their living arrangement in the months of migration. The findings show that the percentile ranks of children who stayed behind in source villages were not different from those of children from non-migrant families. The results indicate that encouraging migrants to leave their children behind can effectively protect a child’s right to education.
Language Barriers, Internal Migration, and Labor Markets in General Equilibrium
Amrutha Manjunath (Penn State)
This paper studies how language barriers impact internal migration, the skill premium, and aggregate welfare using rich microdata from India applied to a quantitative spatial general equilibrium framework. I first document four empirical facts: (1) workers migrate less often to locations where they face high language barriers; (2) migrants with high language barriers are employed less often in speaking-intensive occupations; (3) migrants with high language barriers get a wage premium; and (4) these patterns are strongest for unskilled workers. To explain these facts, I then develop and estimate a static migration model in which heterogeneous workers sort across occupations and locations by skill and language, with wages accounting for worker selection and adjusting in general equilibrium. I show through the lens of the model how language barriers, by increasing worker sorting and selection, significantly obstruct internal migration, augment skill premium, and reduce aggregate welfare. As economies shift towards services, language barriers increasingly impede aggregate gains due to the rising prevalence of speaking-intensive occupations. In the absence of language barriers—relative to observed changes—structural change would have increased aggregate welfare by 1.9 percent. Finally, I calibrate costs of both program provision and learning languages to evaluate potential benefits of language programs for unskilled migrants. Using the calibrated model, I argue that welfare benefits of implementing language programs would outweigh costs.
Farming, Non-Farm Enterprises, and Migration under Incomplete Markets
Davide Pietrobon (Lund University; with Giacomo De Giorgi, Salvatore Di Falco)
We study how rural households in developing countries use non-farm entrepreneurship to smooth consumption following shocks to farm income. Using survey panel data from rural India, we show that farm households respond to transitory shocks to agricultural productivity by reducing farm labor hours, increasing non-farm labor hours, and becoming more likely to engage in non-farm entrepreneurship and temporary migration. Unlike temporary migration, these shocks have persistent effects on non-farm entrepreneurship, as engaging in non-farm activities enables households to accumulate skills that enhance their non-farm productivity. We then structurally estimate a dynamic model of household labor supply decisions across farming, non-farm activities, and temporary migration. Counterfactual exercises reveal that over 30% of non-farm output in rural India comes from activities that households engage in to protect their consumption in response to agricultural productivity shocks. In terms of policy, improving the functioning of insurance markets can substantially promote the modernization of village economies. Specifically, weather insurance contracts and a minimum income guarantee increase non-farm output by about 70% and 40%, respectively. As a potential implication of climate change, we find that a negative shift in the rainfall distribution leads to more than a 30% increase in non-farm output, underscoring the role of climate-driven structural transformation.
Kenya
Overcoming Migration Barriers: The Impact of an Income Smoothing Program for Kenyan Migrants
Gwyneth Miner (UC Berkeley)
Migration to cities can be a gamble for the rural poor in developing countries: a trade-off between the potential upside of higher income growth and the downside of foregone rural earnings. This paper tests whether mitigating potential short-term income loss associated with migration can induce more young rural Kenyans to move to cities. In rural Kenya, I offer 700 young male workers across 111 randomized villages access to an income smoothing program, which provides workers 4 USD for each day of unemployment, conditional on migration to Nairobi. Access to short-term income support in the city more than triples the migration rate over seven months and results in more persistent moves, even after the program ends. These migration effects are also larger than those of an unconditional cash transfer of comparable magnitude. The unemployment program induces migrants who were relatively richer at baseline to migrate compared to control, suggesting that a safety net may lower the opportunity cost and perceived risk of migrating. Overall, the evidence indicates that appropriately designed migration unemployment benefits can induce persistent moves to urban labor markets, potentially leading to larger wage growth over time.
Mexico
Escape the Heat: The Dynamics of Migration as Adaptation to Climate Change
Robert Baluja (University of Arizona)
Earth’s climate is changing, which is widely expected to drive net reductions to human welfare. In this paper, I study how effectively migration will reduce experienced climate damages. To provide answers to my research questions, I develop and estimate a dynamic lifecycle model of migration within Mexico. I combine this with a non-stationary and spatially varying model of the climate, in which I allow for both fully informed and naive expectations of the future progression of climate change. Estimation of the climate model uses daily-level historical weather data and output from state-of-the-art climate simulations. Estimation of the lifecycle model uses a sample of life histories, covering the years 1950–2019, and follows a nested full solution pseudo-maximum likelihood routine. I find that climate damages from business-as-usual warming would be 28% higher if domestic migration within Mexico was no longer available as a tool of adaptation to climate change. Moreover, the fraction of the population that I estimate as forming naive expectations of the climate system would experience an average of 2% less lifetime climate damages from becoming fully informed on the climate transition. Given that most of the increased damages this population faces come from a reduced propensity to migrate, one way to reduce these losses is to subsidize migration. I find that subsidizing migration at the average level of the internality reduces their welfare losses by 8–19%. The exact value of this reduction depends on whether the policy forces people to use the subsidy in a particular period. Policies that allow individuals to choose when to use them are over twice as valuable to the affected population because they do not overly incentivize dynamically suboptimal moves. This sort of dynamically-available policy is common; examples include provisions from the recent Inflation Reduction Act and first-time homeowners tax credits.
Tanzania
Spatial Labor Market Power in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Roles of Self-Employment and Migration
Samuel Marshall (University of Warwick)
Labor markets in low-income countries are characterized by large gaps between rural and urban income, between wage and self-employment income, and high rates of self-employment. Standard explanations for these features are frictions that prevent the efficient allocation of resources. I propose an alternative mechanism: firm labor market power. I develop a spatial general equilibrium model of monopsony to disentangle the role of labor market power from migration costs and job search costs. I identify the labor supply curve using Tanzania’s 2010 sectoral minimum wage law. I find that rural labor markets are less competitive than their urban counterparts. This finding is driven by the higher share of wage workers employed in large firms. Moving to the competitive equilibrium causes total output to rise by 4.8%. Conversely, reducing migration costs by 10% reduces total output by 4.2%. This counterintuitive finding is explained by the fact that workers choose where to live and work based on the total value of wages and amenities. This creates a wedge between the productively efficient and welfare maximizing labor allocations. The standard result that reducing migration costs causes output to rise is reconciled through either a unidirectional decrease in migration costs in the direction of the city or a symmetric reduction and competitive labor markets.
US
Coworker Networks and Internal Migration in the United States: Evidence from US Administrative Data
Billy Huang (University of Michigan)
Using administrative Census data, I present new empirical evidence of the effects of coworker networks on the location choice of migrants, consistent with information provision about opportunities in other local labor markets. Workers who migrate are significantly more likely to choose the same destination as that of their coworkers, than the destinations of non-coworkers from the same industry and location. Additionally, coworkers who have worked together longer have a greater likelihood of migrating to the same locations. Moves to the same destination firms account for only a small portion of the network effect, suggesting that direct job referrals play only a small role in facilitating such migration. The estimated network effects are stronger among workers who move further distances, are older, and have higher earnings. I find that excluding moves associated with relocation within the same firm, and excluding establishment closures, do not significantly alter the results, consistent with a primary role of information provision about destination markets through coworkers.
Migration as Climate Adaptation: Evidence from California Wildfires
Victoria Wang (UCLA)
Natural disasters are expected to impact a large and increasing number of people with climate change. The movement from risky to safe areas – “adaptive migration” – is theorized to be a key strategy for minimizing the costs of natural disasters. This paper provides novel empirical estimates of the extent of adaptive migration, highlights financial constraints as a barrier, and identifies the causal impact of government disaster aid receipt on migration in the context of California, where fires have become more frequent and severe. Using detailed individual-level geographic data, I estimate the effect of wildfires on migration using a difference-in-differences (DID) event study design by comparing the migration behavior before and after a fire of individuals in census blocks that are burned for the first time with that of those in never-burned blocks within a census tract. I find that an individual experiencing a first fire has a 6.5-percentage-point (p.p.) higher probability of out-migration after four years, an 18.5% increase. Those who experience a fire are not more likely to be in safe areas. However, individuals less likely to be financially constrained after the fire (i.e. those with high credit scores) are more likely to move to safe areas after four years. Leveraging a new instrument for aid receipt – taking advantage of the fact that politically competitive counties are more likely to receive aid – I find that government aid is associated with higher migration, albeit not to safe areas. Overall, migration is occurring, but adaptive responses are small. Moreover, government aid could be redesigned to improve the level of adaptive migration out of risky areas.
Historical Papers
China
Reshaping Partition into Partnership: Forced Diversity and Development in Rural China
Bin Huang (UZH)
What is the impact of ethnic diversity on cooperation and development? This paper provides micro-level evidence from Communist China's rural forced integration campaign during the 1950s-1980s, which brought together farmers from diverse ethnic backgrounds to live and work collectively in agriculture and public goods projects. Using a regression discontinuity design, the findings reveal that institutional context shapes the effects of ethnic diversity on cooperation and development. During the campaign, forced ethnic diversity had a negative impact on interethnic marriage rates and GDP per capita. However, after the campaign ended, these effects shifted to positive. In the long run, the experience of ethnic diversity due to the forced integration campaign led to increased voluntary participation in interethnic farmer cooperatives, which grew larger and more efficient in production. The positive effects are attributed to strengthened interethnic networks and reduced inequality in human capital accumulation. Marketization, as a key institutional change, played a crucial role in transforming the impact of ethnic diversity from negative to positive. This paper highlights the importance of institutions in shaping the effects of ethnic diversity.
Malaysia
Coercive Growth: Forced Resettlement and Ethnicity-Based Agglomeration
Shanon Hsuan-Ming Hsu (University of Chicago)
How do social divisions affect the benefits of agglomeration? While the clustering of people can enhance productivity through social interactions, social divisions such as ethnic segregation and tension may limit these gains. To answer this question, I leverage an ethnic-based resettlement program that forcibly relocated 600,000 rural Chinese into compact villages in 1950s British Malaya. I find that, decades later, areas with higher resettlement had persistently higher population densities and concentrations of Chinese, driven by both the program’s direct impact and internal migration. Moreover, these areas were wealthier, more industrialized, and exhibited greater labor market specialization. However, the economic benefits primarily accrued to the Chinese population, while other ethnic groups saw only marginal gains when geographically integrated with the Chinese and working in non-agricultural sectors. To assess the overall impact of the program, I estimate a quantitative spatial model that allows agglomeration externalities to vary by sector and ethnic composition. While the resettlement increased aggregate output, the gains were insufficient to offset the welfare losses from the program’s coercive nature.
Ethnic Proximity and Politics: Evidence from Colonial Resettlement in Malaysia
Chun Chee Kok (Monash University; with Gedeon Lim)
This paper studies the long-run effects of a colonial-era resettlement program of ethnic minorities, on contemporary economic outcomes and political preferences of ethnic majority individuals in receiving areas. In ethnic Malay-majority Malaysia, the colonial British relocated 500,000 rural ethnic Chinese minorities into fenced-up, isolated, mono-ethnic camps (1948 – 1960) all across rural Malaysia. This brought some pre-existing ethnic Malay-majority areas into closer contact with ethnic Chinese minorities but not others. Site selection criteria were largely military in nature. Using a spatial randomization inference-type approach, we construct counterfactual village locations based on this criteria. Areas located immediately next to Chinese New Villages (0-2km) experienced better economic outcomes and, in turn, had lower vote shares for the ethno-nationalistic coalition, than polling districts located next to similarly suitable, counterfactual locations. We provide suggestive evidence that these lower vote shares were driven by all voters, not just the ethnic Chinese. Together, our results suggest that persistent differences in inter-ethnic proximity can have a lasting, negative impact on voter preferences for ethno-nationalistic politics, by improving economic outcomes and creating opportunities for sustained but transient inter-ethnic interactions.
US
Networks and Geographic Mobility: Evidence from World War II Navy Ships
Allison Green (Princeton)
This paper uses quasi-random assignment to World War II Navy ships during World War II to study how personal networks shape migration patterns. Using newly constructed data on 1.4 million sailors, I measure exposure to geographically diverse shipmates and estimate its impact on post-war migration. A one-standard-deviation increase in a sailor’s exposure to shipmates from different states raises the probability of out-migration from his own state by 4-5% by 1950. Effects on directed migration are larger but heterogeneous by destination, increasing moves to fast-growing Census divisions by over 15%. I then estimate a discrete choice migration model with embedded networks, revealing Navy ties encouraged long-distance moves, in part substituting short-distance moves that would have otherwise occurred. Using variation from Navy networks to construct instruments for the probability of migrating, I estimate large returns to network-facilitated migration, suggesting Navy ties enabled moves to higher opportunity areas.
Time to Accumulate: The Great Migration and the Rise of the American South
Dongkyu Yang (University of Colorado)
The idea that labor scarcity can induce economic development has been long hypothesized (Hicks, 1932; Habakkuk, 1962), but the evidence remains limited. This paper examines how the Second Great Migration (1940–1970) spurred structural change in the American South between 1970 and 2010. Empirical results using shift-share instruments show that out-migration incentivized capital investment and capital-augmenting technical change, increasing capital per worker and output in both agriculture and manufacturing at least until 2010. Labor was reallocated from agriculture to non-agriculture. I then develop a dynamic spatial equilibrium model that allows for substitution between factors of production, factor-biased technical change, and factor abundance-based trade to characterize this process. The quantitative analysis indicates that labor-capital substitution played a major role in adjustments to South-to-North migration.
All of them that were linked from the department’s job market candidate list (not all departments had such a list) and had a PDF version of the paper available.