Note: This post was crossposted from the Lauren Policy blog by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
In economics, graduate students going on the job market present a single job market paper (that is supposed to showcase their skills and work).
As I did last year, I’ve gathered all the migration-related job market papers from the top 150 economics departments1 (as ranked by RePEc) and top 10 ag econ departments (as ranked by RePEc). I have also cross-checked via econ.now for papers involving “migrants”, “migration”, and “immigration”.
Earlier this week, I posted a roundup of international migration job market papers; this post focuses on domestic (within-country) migration. There is, of course, some overlap between migration and urban economics; I’ve used my own judgment for when papers about moving counted as being about domestic migration.
I’ve organized the papers by topic. The topics are listed below:
- Climate Migration
- Economic History
- Household Relocation
- Internal Migration in China (and Hukou)
- Urbanization
Climate Migration
Moumita Das (UCSC) and Anirban Sanya (Reserve Bank of India)
The impact of climate-induced temporary migration remains largely unexplored. Yet, this flow is widespread in developing countries and also responds to warming. The distinction from permanent migration is critical: because temporary migrants are often under-counted and unaccounted for in local administrative planning, they generate a distinct externality through the systematic underprovisioning of public services. Using a large-scale panel survey in India, we find that a one-degree rise in mean daily temperature increases temporary out-migration rates by 2%-6%. To investigate spatial spillovers under widespread climate change, we develop a model with both migration channels where temperature affects productivity and the under-provisioning of public services degrades local amenities for everyone. We use this framework to quantify the welfare costs of restricting each migration channel and compare different policy responses under climate change. Under the IPCC SSP 5-8.5 climate change scenario, restricting temporary migration generates welfare costs larger than restricting permanent migration, demonstrating that temporary flows are a critical but overlooked adaptation mechanism. Remedying the under-provisioning of services for temporary migrants delivers more than thrice the welfare gains from cost-equivalent place-based adaptation measures. These results have implications for the allocation of scarce climate adaptation funds in developing countries.
Michael Tueting (University of St. Gallen)
Negative local labor market shocks create strong incentives to migrate, yet low-income households often remain in place. This paper studies how income shapes migration responses to climate change and the resulting welfare effects. Using Brazilian Census data, I show that high-income individuals are systematically more mobile than low-income individuals from the same origin. To interpret this pattern and quantify the impacts of climate change, I develop a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model with monetary migration costs and liquidity constraints, embedded in a two-sector trade framework in which rising temperatures depress agricultural productivity. The quantitative results imply sharply regressive welfare losses: in already hot regions, low-income households experience permanent consumption declines of about 0.6-0.9% per period, with worst-case losses near 3.3%, while richer households are largely insulated. Two mechanisms drive these disparities: climate shocks reduce agricultural wages in hot areas, and monetary migration costs disproportionately burden low-income individuals, limiting their ability to relocate in response. A counterfactual policy that makes low-income individuals as mobile as high income individuals–modeled as a targeted subsidy–raises low-income individuals’ welfare by 24%, offsets 4% of climate losses, and increases aggregate output by relocating labor to more productive regions. Adaptation to climate change depends not only on where productivity shocks occur but also on who can afford to relocate. Consequently, adverse shocks tend to fall disproportionately on those unable to afford relocation.
Economic History
Maxwell Bullard (Texas A&M) and Jacob Van Leeuwen (BYU)
Where children grow up shapes their economic outcomes, but identifying causal place effects is difficult because families choose where to live. To overcome this challenge, we study the Orphan Train Movement, a large-scale child welfare program from 1853-1929 that relocated orphaned children from northeastern cities to families across the United States. Institutional procedures resulted in quasi-random variation in placement locations based on arrival timing to an orphanage. We digitize archival records and link riders to Census data to measure long-run outcomes. We define place opportunity using county-level characteristics capturing education, urbanization, wealth, and labor market size. Riders placed in high-opportunity counties earn more lifetime income, have fewer children, and are less likely to work in agriculture. These effects persist into the second generation. Examining dimensions separately reveals that urbanization, wealth, and labor market size drive effects. We find important age heterogeneity, where older children show larger marginal gains from high-opportunity places despite younger children having higher adult baseline earnings. Decomposing place effects by geographic scale shows household factors are approximately five times larger than county-level measures, though both are independently significant. Intergenerational transmission operates through a persistent change to individuals rather than geographic persistence, as effects continue despite high migration from riders’ original placement counties. Our findings provide the first causal evidence that place effects transmit across generations.
Gabrielle Grafton (Brown) and Michael Neubauer (Brown)
Despite the extensive literature on the Great Migration, very little is known about
the economic and social consequences on Southern non-migrants. We study the impact
out-migration imposes on those who remain behind, focusing on Black Americans who remained in the South during the first decade of the Great Migration. We build a shift-share instrument for the net Black out-migration rate using shocks to manufacturing employment in Northern cities. We find that both Black and White non-migrants experienced increases in wages due to out-migration. Black out-migration also led to farm closures and less racial hostility in Southern communities. We identify labor supply shocks, occupation switching, and changes in the production process as the mechanisms driving our results. At least in the short-term, out-migration can be beneficial for non-migrants.
Dante Yasui (Oregon)
During World War II a large scale forced migration of over 100,000 Japanese American immigrants and their citizen children lead to relocation away from the West Coast. I analyse the effect that this forced relocation had on the post-war earnings of a linked sample of likely internees. My empirical strategy uses an individual-level panel of Japanese and Chinese men and women to compare earnings before and after internment. I find that individuals who were likely interned experienced faster growth in earnings compared to their counterfactual earnings if they had not been interned. The possible mechanisms which might explain this seeming adaptation include occupational change and later migration decisions.
Household Relocation
Andrew Joung (Michigan) and James Reeves (University of Colorado Denver)
Using restricted Census microdata, we examine the role of location and mobility in the intergenerational transmission of parental job loss on children’s long-run human capital. Following job loss, children experience a permanent rise in commuting zone outmigration. Without accounting for the location of the job loss, we find that this mobility leads children to worse neighborhoods with insignificant changes to college attendance. However, this masks sharply divergent impacts between families across different labor markets. Exploiting labor market scarring from the Great Recession, we show that children whose parents lost jobs in scarred markets experience greater outmigration, improved neighborhood quality, and increased college attendance.
Jiwon Lee (NYU)
This paper studies how fertility and children reshape couples’ relocation decisions and their gendered consequences for mobility, wages, and welfare. Using Australian panel data, I document that before children, either spouse’s preferences similarly predict long-distance moves, whereas after the first birth, husbands’ preferences dominate, and the gender wage gap widens following relocation. To interpret these patterns, I develop a dynamic collective household model with endogenous fertility, joint job search, and bargaining over relocation under limited commitment, in which decision weights respond endogenously to spouses’ outside options. The model highlights two mechanisms: children raise the payoff to specialization and weaken the primary caregiver’s outside option, tilting decisions toward the male partner’s preferences and gains. I provide causal evidence for these channels using a 2015 reform to Australia’s Family Tax Benefit that tightened eligibility for single-earner couples for a benefit paid to the non-working spouse. The reform, which reduced the payoff to specialization, decreased husbands’ job-related moves among couples with young children but increased them for couples with low-earning wives, where the bargaining channel dominated. Estimates from the model show that joint-search frictions align relocations with the fertility window and that bargaining frictions generate substantial inefficiencies, including moves that disproportionately lower women’s wages and welfare. Policy counterfactuals reveal that moving subsidies raise mobility but amplify within-household inequality, whereas insuring caregivers against career interruptions, such as through childcare support, promotes moves with more equal wage growth and welfare without materially reducing overall mobility.
Internal Migration In China (and Hukou)
Fangxu Duan (Boston College)
A large literature finds that migrants tend to have fewer children, typically by comparing migrants with non-migrants or by exploiting variation in moving costs to study how migration barriers influence fertility. In this paper, I reverse the channel and ask: how do fertility constraints affect migration? Using China’s shift from the One-Child to the Two-Child Policy as a natural experiment in a difference-in-differences design, I find that relaxing the fertility bound increases the probability that one spouse migrates by 3.10 percentage points, relative to a 16.45% baseline migration rate in the 2010 census. This result remains robust even after accounting for the contemporaneous policy of 2014 Hukou Reform. I argue that looser fertility constraints increase the expected number of children by couples, thereby strengthening their incentives for temporary migration to earn higher income and finance child-rearing costs. To interpret and quantify these dynamics, I develop and estimate a household-level dynamic joint discrete choice model of migration and fertility. The model predicts that further relaxing fertility limits (e.g., from the Three-Child Policy to full removal of restrictions) would have limited effects on both fertility and internal migration. In contrast, it shows that reducing non-financial migration barriers (e.g., the Hukou policy) would be a more effective channel for promoting both internal migration and fertility.
Weizheng Lai (Bowdoin) and Yu Qiu (Pitt)
Contemporary public discourse often raises concerns that migration may threaten social stability, fueling support for exclusionary integration policies. We study this issue by estimating the causal effect of China’s recent reform of its internal migration institutions on labor unrest (e.g., strikes). Exploiting variation from the reform’s population-based discontinuity rule, we find that the reform significantly reduced labor unrest. A key mechanism is migrants’ enhanced settlement intentions: to secure the opportunity of settlement offered by the reform, migrants have weaker incentives to engage in unrest. We show that the reform increased the likelihood of migrants remaining in migration destinations, and through a novel causal mediation analysis, we find that enhanced settlement intentions can explain 63 percent of the reform’s effect on labor unrest. Moreover, the reform’s effect on labor unrest is more pronounced in places where migrants live closer to their origins or are culturally similar to natives, making them more inclined to stay once the reform lowers institutional integration barriers. We find no evidence that the reform changed migrant composition, significantly improved migrants’ wellbeing, or prompted governments to tighten social control.
Junni Pan (Purdue)
College education is widely regarded as a pathway to local labor markets, particularly where migration frictions limit labor mobility. This paper examines how such frictions shape college choices in China, where mobility is constrained by both formal migration restrictions and informal barriers. Using a national administrative dataset on four-year college admissions from 2005 to 2011, I show that relaxing migration restrictions through hukou reforms enabled colleges in reformed cities to attract higher-quality students. The largest gains occurred in colleges located in economically more developed cities relative to students’ origins, consistent with the mechanism of improved local labor market prospects. Counterfactual analysis based on a college choice model indicates that easing migration restrictions in major cities strengthens the sorting of stronger students into treated colleges and raises aggregate welfare, though the gains are unevenly distributed. Welfare increases further when students can freely access the highest-paying labor markets. These results highlight the role of both formal and informal migration frictions in shaping spatial skill sorting and welfare.
Conghan Zheng (UAB/BSE)
Parental migration and family separation are key factors affecting the outcomes of the next generation. This paper examines the joint household decision of parental rural-urban migration and children’s education in China, where the Hukou system restricts migrants’ access to urban public services. I develop a nested discrete choice model that incorporates expected returns to children’s education as part of the parental migration decision. Estimation results using household panel data show that rural parents migrate for better educational opportunities for their children and a wage premium, avoiding high costs but still concentrating in the most restrictive and congested destinations. Counterfactual analyses suggest that education subsidies at the rural origin of migrants are more effective than subsidies at the destination, or even a universal subsidy, in reducing family separation and improving children’s school performance. And all education subsidies are more effective than mobility restrictions in controlling migration flows without harming the usually hidden but highly vulnerable group in labor migration - children, suggesting that policies targeting the motivation for migration are more effective than mobility frictions in controlling migration.
Urbanization
Andre Gray (UCSD)
The impact of migration is not just a function of how many people migrate, but where they come from. Migrants carry region-specific identities, traits and skills that shape outcomes in receiving areas. In rapidly urbanizing African cities, the composition of migrants may play a negative role, as ethnic and linguistic divisions drive conflict and counteract classic agglomeration forces. This paper disentangles the effects of migrant flows and migrant composition on productivity in destinations. I build a subnational panel of internal migrant flows across Africa and develop a nonlinear shift-share instrument that identifies shocks to both levels and the birthplace composition of migrants. Using exogenous variation from climate, commodity and conflict shocks, I identify changes to the size and composition of migrants. I find that cities that receive migrants from more diverse birthplaces have lower short-run growth, but experience long-run urbanization benefits. The effects of migrant composition are heterogeneous, with more diverse cities experiencing higher ethnic conflict, but also higher rates of structural transformation. The methods proposed have broad applications to identifying nonlinear effects of migration, when relative group sizes matter for outcomes.
