Friendship ties and geographical mobility, evidence from the BHPS

A common finding in analyses of geographic mobility is a strong association between past movement and current mobility, a phenomenon that has given rise to the so called ‘mover-stayer model’. We argue in this paper that one of the driving forces behind this heterogeneity could be the strength of local social ties. Geographical movement breaks-up local friendship ties, at least partly, and this effect could feed back into future mobility behaviour. We use data from the BHPS on the location of the three closest friends and the frequency of contacts to measure the intensity of local friendship ties. We use characteristics of the family background, such as the sib-ship size and the parental education, to instrument for the size of local friendship networks at an adult age. The results indicate that assuming the exogeneity of local social networks underestimates their absolute negative effect on mobility. After instrumenting for the size of the networks, we find that friendship networks have a substantial negative effect on the probability of moving