Internal migration and human capital theory: To what extent is it selective?

Martin Korpi and William A.V. Clark

Economics Letters, 2015, vol. 136, issue C, 31-34

Abstract: Empirical studies of internal labor migration, modeling average outcomes, suggest migrants move to enhance returns to their labor. In contrast, major international surveys show less than a third of internal migrants as motivated by employment reasons. Using Swedish panel data for the years 2001–2009, this paper addresses this disconnect by examining the full distribution of migrant income changes. Results from initial CEM matching and quantile regression suggest that large returns to internal migration are mostly captured by the higher educated, those initially low in the income distribution and those heading into the largest metropolitan regions. Much if not most of migration outcomes are however a wash and indeed often negative in terms of pay-off. This suggests models of average outcomes as insufficient in addressing human capital motivated migration.

Keywords: Migration; Human capital; Labor mobility; Urban rural (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J61 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176515003316
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecolet:v:136:y:2015:i:c:p:31-34

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2015.08.016

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().