Population aging, migration spillovers, and the decline in interstate migration

Fatih Karahan and Serena Rhee

No 699, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: We investigate the role of the aging of the U.S. population in the decline in interstate migration since the mid-1980s. Using an instrumental variables strategy on cross-state data, we show that an aging workforce causes the migration rates of all age groups in a state to drop. This demonstrates that the effect of aging on migration includes indirect effects that go beyond the direct effect of raising the workforce share of groups with lower migration rates. We then develop an island model in which firms can hire workers either locally or from other locations, and show that an aging population leads firms to recruit more locally. This improves the local job prospects of all workers, which causes migration rates of all age groups to fall, consistent with our empirical findings. Our quantitative analysis suggests that this channel accounts for around half the migration decline, substantially more than what would be predicted solely by the direct effect.

Keywords: interstate migration; labor mobility; population aging (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 J11 J24 J61 R12 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dge, nep-lma, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr699.html Summary (text/html)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/rese ... orts/sr699.pdf?la=en Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Population Aging, Migration Spillovers and the Decline in Interstate Migration (2015)
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:fednsr:699

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().