BUREAU OF THE CENSUS STATISTICAL RESEARCH DIVISION REPORT SERIES SRD Research Report Number: CENSUS/SRD/RR-90/07 FORECASTING STATE-TO-STATE MIGRATION RATES bY

Models of internal migration can be found in the demographic, geographic and economic literatures. Unlike most of these models which are based on cross-sectional analysis of migration rates, the approach here is to incorporate longitudinal as well as crosssectional aspects. Empirical modeling using this approach is possible using a data base recently revised and updated by the U. S. Bureau of the Census. The model building approach presented in this paper relies heavily on diagnostic and graphical methods. An interesting methodological aspect of the model building is the presence of rampant crosssectional heteroscedasticity, moderate contemporaneous correlation and mild longitudinal autocorrelation in the transformed data. An important conclusion is that, based on the available data, differenced rates appear stationary. A corollary of this conclusion is that the most recent migration rate takes on an important role in short-term forecasting.