Using Restricted-Access ACS Data to Examine Economic and Noneconomic Factors of Interstate Migration By Race and Ethnicity
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-12
Abstract
We explore how determinants of internal migration differ between Black non-Hispanics, White non-Hispanics, and Hispanics using micro-level, restricted-use American Community Survey (ACS) data matched to data on attributes of sub-geographies down to the county level. This paper extends the discussion of internal migration in the U.S. by not only observing relationships between economic and noneconomic factors and household-level propensities to migrate, but also how these relationships differ across race and ethnicity within smaller geographies than have been explored in previous literature. We show that when controlling for household and location characteristics, minorities have a lower propensity to migrate than White households and document nuances in the responsiveness of internal migration to individual and locational attributes by racial and ethnic population subgroups.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
black,
minority,
ethnicity,
ethnic,
hispanic,
white,
relocating,
racial,
race,
housing,
relocation,
neighborhood,
resident,
disparity,
residence,
migrate,
migration,
migrating,
migrant,
relocate
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Bureau of Economic Analysis,
American Community Survey
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Using Restricted-Access ACS Data to Examine Economic and Noneconomic Factors of Interstate Migration By Race and Ethnicity' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperGeographic Immobility in the United States: Assessing the Prevalence and Characteristics of Those Who Never Migrate Across State Lines Using Linked Federal Tax Microdata
March 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-19
This paper explores the prevalence and characteristics of those who never migrate at the state scale in the U.S. Studying people who never migrate requires regular and frequent observation of their residential location for a lifetime, or at least for many years. A novel U.S. population-sized longitudinal dataset that links individual level Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) administrative records supplies this information annually, along with information on income and socio-demographic characteristics. We use these administrative microdata to follow a cohort aged between 15 and 50 in 2001 from 2001 to 2016, differentiating those who lived in the same state every year during this period (i.e., never made an interstate move) from those who lived in more than one state (i.e., made at least one interstate move). We find those who never made an interstate move comprised 75 percent of the total population of this age cohort. This percentage varies by year of age but never falls below 62 percent even for those who were teenagers or young adults in 2001. There are also variations in these percentages by sex, race, nativity, and income, with the latter having the largest effects. We also find substantial variation in these percentages across states. Our findings suggest a need for more research on geographically immobile populations in U.S.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Location of Displaced New Orleans Residents in the Year After Hurricane Katrina
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-19
Using individual data from the restricted version of the American Community Survey, we examined the displacement locations of pre-Katrina adult residents of New Orleans in the year after the hurricane. Over half (53%) of adults had returned to'or remained in'the New Orleans metropolitan area, with just under one-third of the total returning to the dwelling in which they resided prior to Katrina. Among the remainder, Texas was the leading location with almost 40% of those living away from the metropolitan area (18% of the total), followed by other locations in Louisiana (12%), the South region of the US other than Louisiana and Texas (12%), and elsewhere in the U.S. (5%). Black adults were considerably more likely than nonblack adults to be living elsewhere in Louisiana, in Texas, and elsewhere in the South. The observed race disparity was not accounted for by any of the demographic or socioeconomic covariates in the multinomial logistic regression models. Consistent with hypothesized effects, we found that young adults (25'39 years of age) were more likely to move further away from New Orleans and that adults born outside Louisiana were substantially more likely to have relocated away from the state.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperIndividual Social Capital and Migration
March 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-14
This paper determines how individual, relative to community social capital affects individual migration decisions. We make use of non-public data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey to predict multi-dimensional social capital for observations in the Current Population Survey. We find evidence that individuals are much less likely to have moved to a community with average social capital levels lower than their own and that higher levels of community social capital act as positive pull-factor amenities. The importance of that amenity differs across urban/rural locations. We also confirm that higher individual social capital is a negative predictor of migration.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperIn-migration and Dilution of Community Social Capital
June 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-32
Consistent with predictions from the literature, we find that higher levels of in-migration dilute multiple dimensions of a community's level of social capital. The analysis employs a 2SLS methodology to account for potential endogeneity of migration.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperMigration Decisions in Arctic Alaska: Empirical Evidence of the Stepping Stones Hypothesis
December 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-41
This paper explores hypotheses of hierarchical migration using data from the Alaskan Arctic. We focus on migration of I'upiat people, who are indigenous to the region, and explore the role of income, harvests of subsistence resources, and other place characteristics in migration decisions. To test related hypotheses we use confidential micro-data from the US Census Bureau's 2000 Decennial Census of Population and Income. Using predicted earnings and subsistence along with place invariant characteristics we generate migration probabilities using a mixed multinomial and conditional logit model. Our results support stepwise migration patterns, both up and down an urban and rural hierarchy. At the same time, we also identify differences between men and women, and we find mixed effects of place amenities and predicted earnings.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperWho Gentrifies Low Income Neighborhoods?
January 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-02
This paper uses confidential Census data, specifically the 1990 and 2000 Census Long- Form data, to study the demographic processes underlying the gentrification of low income urban neighborhoods during the 1990's. In contrast to previous studies, the analysis is conducted at the more refined census-tract level with a narrower definition of gentrification and more narrowly defined comparison neighborhoods. The analysis is also richly disaggregated by demographic characteristic, uncovering differential patterns by race, education, age and family structure that would not have emerged in the more aggregate analysis in previous studies. The results provide little evidence of displacement of low-income non-white households in gentrifying neighborhoods. The bulk of the income gains in gentrifying neighborhoods are attributed to white college graduates and black high school graduates. It is the disproportionate in-migration of the former and the disproportionate retention and income gains of the latter that appear to be the main engines of gentrification.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperStability and Change in Individual Determinants of Migration: Evidence from 1985-1990 and 1995 to 2000
November 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-27
In this paper, we compare the reliability of migration estimates from two rather different macroeconomic periods in recent U.S. history. One of these periods, 1985-1990 coincides with the culmination of a vast industrial restructuring which saw a significant decline in manufacturing employment. The other period, 1995-2000, encompasses a time of robust economic growth and tight labor markets driven by productivity gains associated with new technologies. Our interest here is in the stability of common individual-level predictors of migration in these rather disparate macroeconomic contexts. Using confidential internal versions of the 1990 and 2000 Census long-form data, we estimate logistic models of the likelihood that individuals will migrate. The geographic detail in the internal Census data permits us to measure migration in ways that are not possible with public-domain Census data on persons. We develop migration definitions that distinguish between local residential mobility likely associated with life course transitions from migration out of the labor market area that may be driven more by employment and other socioeconomic considerations. Using logistic modeling, we find that the same individual attributes predict migration reasonably well during both periods. We also compute some illustrative probabilities of migration that show temporal stability in migration predictors could be lessened by certain changes in population composition.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Decline of Volunteering in the United States: Is it the Economy?
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-41
This article investigates the complex interactions between local and national economic contexts and volunteering behavior. We examine three dimensions of local economic context'economic disadvantage (e.g., the percentage of families living in poverty), income inequality, and economic growth (e.g., the change in median household income) and the impact of a national/global economic jolt'the Great Recession. Analysis of data from the Current Population Survey's (CPS) Volunteering Supplement (2002-2015) reveals. Individuals who live in places characterized by economic disadvantage and economic inequality are less likely to volunteer than individuals in more advantaged, equitable communities. The recession had a dampening effect on volunteering overall, but it had the largest dampening effect on individual volunteering in communities with above average rates of income equality and higher rates of economic growth. While individuals living in rural communities were more likely to volunteer than their urban counterparts before the recession, rural/urban differences disappear after the recession.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDO PUBLIC TUITION SUBSIDIES PROMOTE COLLEGE ENROLLMENT? EVIDENCE FROM COMMUNITY COLLEGE TAXING DISTRICTS IN TEXAS
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-32
This paper estimates the effect of tuition rates on college enrollment using data for Texas from the 1990 and 2000 Censuses and the 2004 ' 2010 American Community Surveys and geographical data on Community College Taxing Districts. The effect of tuition on enrollment is identified by the facts that tuition rates for those living within a taxing district are lower than those living outside the taxing district and in Texas not all geographic locations are in a taxing district. While the estimated effect of tuition on enrollment depends on the sample used, it is negative and mostly statistically significant in the samples of iadults 18 and older and negative and sometimes statistically significant in the samples of traditional age students 18 to 24. The estimated effect of tuition on enrollment, however, is found to vary considerably by poverty level status with an increase in tuition rates having a statistically significant negative effect on college enrollment for those with household incomes that are at least 200% of the poverty level both for traditional aged students 18 to 24 years old and all adults 18 and older.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperBlack Pioneers, Intermetropolitan Movers, and Housing Desegregation
March 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-23
In this project, we examine the mobility choices of black households between 1960 and 2000. We use household-level Decennial Census data geocoded down to the census tract level. Our results indicate that, for black households, one's status as an intermetropolitan migrant ' especially from an urban area outside the South ' is a powerful predictor of pioneering into a white neighborhood. Moreover, and perhaps even more importantly, the ratio of these intermetropolitan black arrivals to the incumbent metropolitan black population is a powerful predictor of whether a metropolitan area experiences substantial declines in housing segregation.View Full Paper PDF
