Education, Job Search, and Migration

Job-search and migration behavior dier across educational groups. In this paper, I explore several dierences between the migration and search behavior of workers with dierent 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 location) also increases with education. I present a simple model that captures these facts and generates a number of predictions about dierential 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 veried using CPS data.