Education, Job Search and Migration

Job-search and migration behavior differ across educational groups. In this paper, I explore several differences between the migration and search behavior of workers with different levels of education, both theoretically and empirically. I start with two stylized facts. First, the propensity to migrate increases with education. Second, conditional on migration, the probability that a worker moves with a job in hand (rather than moving to search for a job in the new location) also increases with education. I present a simple individual optimization problem that captures these facts and generates a number of predictions about differential sensitivity of migration to observed variables by education. These predictions, including a nonmonotonicity of migration elasticities with respect to business-cycle conditions by educational group, and less-educated groups’ higher sensitivity to local economic conditions in the migration decision, are verified using CPS data. ∗Comments welcome to [email protected]. I thank Daron Acemoglu and Olivier Blanchard for helpful advice and guidance. I also benefited from conversations with Saku Aura, Hoyt Bleakley, Al Nucci, and participants in the MIT labor lunch. Pegah Ebrahimi and Amy Mok helped with typing.