Understanding the Migration of Older Americans

Dan Black, Anna Malinovskaya and Seth Sanders

CES Technical Notes Series from Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau

Abstract: In this project we attempted to model the tax induced migration of older Americans. We did this by linking the ACS to the MARF file to study the timing of migration. We show that the MARF file can successfully follow people across time and space and create population statistics on migration by characteristics observed in the ACS. Two issues make this strategy of limited use for studying tax incentivized migration. First, while the MARF allows longitudinal analysis of migration, the cross-sectional nature of the ACS does not allow us to observe the antecedents especially retirement. Second, the asset measures available in the ACS are poor proxies of wealth and make it difficult to conduct a designed based analysis when classifying individuals by their tax incentive to move is important. We suggest that more detailed asset data is needed to accomplish this goal. We also attempted to study migration of older individuals by linking individuals age 56-61 observed in Census 2000 to their records in Census 2010 and documented their 10-year migration patterns by wealth (proxied by housing wealth) and the tax rate of their origin and destination states. In this report, we present our findings on the 10-year migration patterns of these older individuals originating from California, New York, and Illinois.

Keywords: ACS; MARF; Decennial Census 2000 and 2010 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-08
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https://www2.census.gov/ces/tn/CES-TN-2026-34.pdf Abstract (application/pdf)
https://www.census.gov/about/adrm/ced/apply-for-access.html?CES-TN-2026-34 First version, 2026 (application/pdf)
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