- Economics
- US Labor Market
- Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
It’s a great pleasure to join you in this hallowed setting and discuss a fine paper by Andrea Foschi, Christopher House, Christian Proebsting, and Linda L. Tesar. Their study is brimming with empirical findings, and I will touch on only some of them.
Five of their findings, in particular, set the stage for my remarks below.
- Gross inter-state migration rates fell one-sixth over the 1980s and 90s but show no clear trend since. (Figure 1)
- Absolute net migration rates show no clear trend over the past half century. (Figure 2)
- The elasticity of state-level net migration rates to state-level labor demand shifters exhibits no discernable and statistically significant trend from 1950 to 2011. (Figure 8)
- The cross-state standard deviations of (a) the Bartik labor demand shifter and (b) employment growth rates fell after the early 1980s, flattening out in the 21st century. (Figure 12)
- The declining volatility of state-level shocks contributed to the fall in gross inter-state migration rates. (Section 4.2)
Overall, these findings are reassuring about the extent of spatial mobility in the United States and about the strength of migration responses to regional labor demand shocks. While the authors are circumspect in drawing conclusions, I gather that they also see their results as reassuring in these respects.
