Three essays on household location choice and internal migration in the United States
Open Access
- Author:
- Jayasekera, Deshamithra
- Graduate Program:
- Agricultural, Environmental and Regional Economics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 10, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Douglas Wrenn, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Karen Fisher-Vanden, Major Field Member
Stephen Matthews, Outside Unit & Field Member
Douglas Wrenn, Program Head/Chair
David Abler, Co-Chair of Committee
Brian Thiede, Major Field Member - Keywords:
- Internal Migration
immobility
location choice
employer-based health insurance
return-migration - Abstract:
- Previous research has found that weather disasters contribute to significant social changes in cities exposed to severe weather. Severe weather-led social change is affected by non-random exposure to weather disasters and unequal recovery. In Chapter 2, I combine several strands of literature to explain how such social changes take place in American commuting zones using a structural equilibrium sorting model. An equilibrium sorting model can describe how households make decisions about where to live and compare the amenity-prices trade-off between different groups of households. I use three census years of household-level data from 1990-2010 to find household valuations of location-specific environmental amenities such as severe weather exposure. I allow for heterogeneous outcomes based on level of education and mobility behavior. I find that college-educated workers are willing to pay more to avoid an additional weather disaster and value location-specific amenities more compared to non-college-educated workers, and non-college-educated workers value real income gains more than college-educated households do. Non-college educated workers value safety from weather disasters too. However, their marginal willingness to pay for it is significantly lower than their college-educated colleagues. This vast difference in marginal willingness to pay indicates that non-college-educated workers are more likely to be exposed to severe weather and face difficulties recovering from damages. The latest demography and economics literature on internal migration in the United States has raised concerns over the decline in mobility rates. While the decline is not rapid and not remarkable from a historical perspective, in the short-run the trend in mobility has been downward sloping for at least three consecutive decades. Seminal papers focusing on this decline have shown that the household mobility downturn is directly related to the labor market, and pointed to health insurance, technological advancements, and a homogeneous labor market as possible reasons. In Chapter 3, I focus on internal mobility in the United States and how it has been affected by household health insurance needs. I study a sample of heads-of-households with employer-based health insurance that is working full-time and provide health insurance coverage to their young-adult children. My findings suggest that despite efforts to increase its portability, health insurance still affects household mobility decisions. More specifically I show that Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, while improving access to healthcare for young adults may have inadvertently created a mobility-lock for their parents. I show using a difference-in-difference analysis that employer-based health insurance can have mobility constraints for households who value health insurance. I propose a unique identification strategy using the timings of the young adult and employer mandates of the Affordable Care Act to establish the causal effect of health insurance on long-distance mobility. I propose several robustness scenarios that further establish my thesis. I take up the issue of internal migration of working households in the United States and flexible work arrangements in Chapter 4. Alongside declining long-distance mobility rates two other trends in internal migration have been evident in recent years; an increase in return-migration of households and increasing immobility. Before now, most literature on immobility and return-migration had taken the stance that it is a response to higher moving costs (psychological moving costs), increasing childcare costs, and the need for security that has made households re-turn to their kith-and-kin. However, return-migration data show that it is not traditionally vulnerable groups that frequently move back to their birth states. With this background I seek to answer the question- does attachment to one’s birth state contribute to return-migration and subsequent immobility? I answer this question using a sample of full-time workers employed in occupations that can be done remotely. With the main indicator variable that divides remote-workers and non- remote-workers, I show that when employment is not attached to the "workplace" households choose to move back to their birth states. This paper contributes to the literature on immobility where I show immobility is increasingly becoming voluntary and how that might affect interstate mobility in the United States at a time when work-from-home is becoming the norm. This work is descriptive. However, by carefully selecting the sample of workers and by using coefficient stability tests I am able to make somewhat reasonable causality claims.