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Opportunity Seeking Migration in the United States

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The Economic Geography of Cross-Border Migration

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Abstract

Knapp and White provide a timely review of innovations in U.S. domestic migration research and its consequences for the spatial distribution of population. The authors discuss the crucial shift toward migration modeling which includes site attributes such as natural amenities in addition to factors associated with improvement in earnings in the household location decision. Knapp and White address the following contemporary topics in the study of U.S. domestic migration: migrant selectivity, the use of panel data, and life course migration. They illuminate the development of inter-disciplinary U.S. domestic migration research from economics, demography, sociology, and geography. In “Opportunity Seeking Migration in the United States,” Knapp and White conclude that the results of migration research should inform the “people vs. places” policy debate because a better understanding of the determinants of migration will lead to more efficacious public policy. The authors finally assert that changing demographics will have an increasingly important role in migration patterns and regional population dynamics, providing fruitful opportunities for future migration research regarding age group specific locational preferences.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Conditional logit retains the IIA assumption, while the nested logit model relaxes the assumption for a portion of the model structure [see Christiadi and Cushing (2007), Knapp et al. (2001)].

  2. 2.

    An alternative to propensity score matching, coarsened exact matching, is explored by Korpi and Clark (2015).

  3. 3.

    Compton et al., examine U.S. Census data from 1990 to 2000, which was not available to Costa and Kahn, to show that the proportion of power couples residing in larger metropolitan areas declined over that period, reversing the prior trend.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Associate Professor of Economics Emeritus, Pennsylvania State University–Wilkes-Barre, Lehman, PA, USA

    Thomas A. Knapp

  2. Visiting Scholars in Economics, Minnesota State University Moorhead, Moorhead, MN, USA

    Thomas A. Knapp & Nancy E. White

  3. Professor of Economics Emerita, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA

    Nancy E. White

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  1. Thomas A. Knapp
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Correspondence to Thomas A. Knapp .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, 'S-Hertogenbosch, Noord-Brabant, The Netherlands

    Karima Kourtit

  2. McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

    Bruce Newbold

  3. Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, 'S-Hertogenbosch, Noord-Brabant, The Netherlands

    Peter Nijkamp

  4. The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Mark Partridge

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Knapp, T.A., White, N.E. (2021). Opportunity Seeking Migration in the United States. In: Kourtit, K., Newbold, B., Nijkamp, P., Partridge, M. (eds) The Economic Geography of Cross-Border Migration. Footprints of Regional Science(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48291-6_6

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