Internal Migration in the United States: A Comparative Assessment of the Utility of the Consumer Credit Panel

Jack DeWaard, Janna Johnson and Stephan Whitaker

No 1804, Working Papers (Old Series) from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Abstract: This paper demonstrates that credit bureau data, such as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Consumer Credit Panel/Equifax (CCP), can be used to study internal migration in the United States. It is comparable to, and in some ways superior to, the standard data used to study migration, including the American Community Survey (ACS), the Current Population Survey (CPS), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) county-to-county migration data. CCP-based estimates of migration intensity, connectivity, and spatial focusing are similar to estimates derived from the ACS, CPS, and IRS data. The CCP can measure block-to-block migration and it is available at quarterly rather than annual frequencies. Migrants? precise origins are not available in public versions of the ACS, CPS, or IRS data. We report measures of migration from the CCP data at finer geographies and time intervals. Finally, we disaggregate migration flows into first-, second-, and higher-order moves. Individual-level panels in the CCP make this possible, giving the CCP an additional advantage over the ACS, CPS, or publicly available IRS data.

Keywords: Migration measurement; Credit history; Credit report; Gini index; Crude migration probability; Index of migration connectivity; Migration progression ratio (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C55 C81 J61 O15 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2018-03-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-201804 Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedcwp:1804

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.26509/frbc-wp-201804

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers (Old Series) from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by 4D Library ().