Internal Migration in the US: Updated Facts and Recent Trends

Internal Migration in the US: Updated Facts and Recent Trends*
Raven Molloy
Federal Reserve Board of Governors
Christopher L. Smith
Federal Reserve Board of Governors
Abigail Wozniak
University of Notre Dame, NBER, and IZA
December 2010

PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHORS

Disclaimer: The analysis and conclusions set forth are those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or the Board of Governors.

Introduction
The idea that one can pick up and move to a location that promises better opportunities has long been an important part of the American mystique, a classic example being Steinbeck’s tale of the Joads heading west to escape the Dust Bowl. Indeed, one frequently-cited stylized fact is that internal migration rates—i.e. population flows between regions, states, or cities within a country—are higher in the US than in other countries. However, as with all things mythical and stylized, reality is more complex. The Dust Bowl migrants were actually exceptional in a period of markedly low internal migration (Ferrie 2003, Rosenbloom and Sundstrom 2004). And while the US has one of the highest migration rates in the world by many measures, citizens of some other countries—including Finland, Denmark and Great Britain—appear equally mobile.
Moreover, migration in the US has been falling in the past several decades, calling into question whether high rates of geographic mobility are still a distinguishing characteristic of the US economy. In this article, we update the basic facts on internal migration within the US, adding fifteen years of data since an overview was last published. An examination of migration is particularly important in the context of the current economic environment of slow job growth and depressed housing market activity, because individual relocation decisions often involve changes in employment and housing consumption.
Economists have been interested in

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