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 lo-cation) also increases with education. I present a simple model that captures these facts and generates a number of predictions about dif-ferential sensitivity of migration to observed variables by education. Predictions include a non-monotonicity 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. These predictions are verified using CPS data