Education, Job Search and Migration

Emek Basker

Labor and Demography from EconWPA

Abstract: Job-search and migration behavior differ across educational groups. In this paper, I explore several differences between the migration and search behavior of workers with different levels of education, both theoretically and empirically. I start with two stylized facts. First, the propensity to migrate increases with education. Second, conditional on migration, the probability that a worker moves with a job in hand (rather than moving to search for a job in the new location) also increases with education. I present a simple individual optimization problem that captures these facts and generates a number of predictions about differential sensitivity of migration to observed variables by education. These predictions, including a nonmonotonicity of migration elasticities with respect to business-cycle conditions by educational group, and less-educated groups’ higher sensitivity to local economic conditions in the migration decision, are verified using CPS data.

Keywords: migration; search; unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-lab and nep-ure
Date: 2003-03-13
Note: Type of Document - pdf; prepared on IBM PC - PC-TEX; to print on PostScript; pages: 37 ; figures: included. University of Missouri Working Paper 02-16
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpla:0303003

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