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Geographic 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.
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Garage Entrepreneurs or just Self-Employed? An Investigation into Nonemployer Entrepreneurship
October 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-61
Nonemployers, businesses without employees, account for most businesses in the U.S. yet are poorly understood. We use restricted administrative and survey data to describe nonemployer dynamics, overall performance, and performance by demographic group. We find that eventual outcome ' migration to employer status, continuing as a nonemployer, or exit ' is closely related to receipt growth. We provide estimates of employment creation by firms that began as nonemployers and become employers (migrants), estimating that relative to all firms born in 1996, nonemployer migrants accounted for 3-17% of all net jobs in the seventh year after startup. Moreover, we find that migrants' employment creation declined by 54% for the cohorts born between 1996 to 2014. Our results are consistent with increased adjustment frictions in recent periods, and suggest accessibility to transformative entrepreneurship for everyday Americans has declined.
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Internal Migration in the U.S. During the COVID-19 Pandemic
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-50
Survey and administrative internal migration data disagree on whether the COVID-19 pandemic increased or decreased mobility in the U.S. Moreover, though scholars have theorized and documented migration in response to environmental hazards and economic shocks, the novel conditions posed by a global pandemic make it difficult to hypothesize whether and how American migration might change as a result. We link individual-level data from the United States Postal Service's National Change of Address (NCOA) registry to American Community Survey (ACS) and Current Population Survey (CPS-ASEC) responses and other administrative records to document changes in the level, geography, and composition of migrant flows between 2019 and 2021. We find a 2% increase in address changes between 2019 and 2020, representing an additional 603,000 moves, driven primarily by young adults, earners at the extremes of the income distribution, and individuals (as opposed to families) moving over longer distances. Though the number of address changes returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2021, the pandemic-era geographic and compositional shifts in favor of longer distance moves away from the Pacific and Mid-Atlantic regions toward the South and in favor of younger, individual movers persisted. We also show that at least part of the disconnect between survey, media, and administrative/third-party migration data sources stems from the apparent misreporting of address changes on Census Bureau surveys. Among ACS and CPS-ASEC householders linked to NCOA data and filing a permanent change of address in their 1-year survey response reference period, only around 68% of ACS and 49% of CPS-ASEC householders also reported living in a different residence one year ago in their survey response.
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Low-Wage Jobs, Foreign-Born Workers, and Firm Performance
January 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-05
We examine how migrant workers impact firm performance using administrative data from the United States. Exploiting an unexpected change in firms' likelihood of securing low-wage workers through the H-2B visa program, we find limited crowd-out of other forms of employment and no impact on average pay at the firm. Yet, access to H-2B workers raises firms' annual revenues and survival likelihood. Our results are consistent with the notion that guest worker programs can help address labor shortages without inflicting large losses on incumbent workers.
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Producing U.S. Population Statistics Using Multiple Administrative Sources
November 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-58
We identify several challenges encountered when constructing U.S. administrative record-based (AR-based) population estimates for 2020. Though the AR estimates are higher than the 2020 Census at the national level, they are over 15 percent lower in 5 percent of counties, suggesting that locational accuracy can be improved. Other challenges include how to achieve comprehensive coverage, maintain consistent coverage across time, filter out nonresidents and people not alive on the reference date, uncover missing links across person and address records, and predict demographic characteristics when multiple ones are reported or when they are missing. We discuss several ways of addressing these issues, e.g., building in redundancy with more sources, linking children to their parents' addresses, and conducting additional record linkage for people without Social Security Numbers and for addresses not initially linked to the Census Bureau's Master Address File. We discuss modeling to predict lower levels of geography for people lacking those geocodes, the probability that a person is a U.S. resident on the reference date, the probability that an address is the person's residence on the reference date, and the probability a person is in each demographic characteristic category. Regression results illustrate how many of these challenges and solutions affect the AR county population estimates.
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Are Immigrants More Innovative? Evidence from Entrepreneurs
November 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-56
We evaluate the contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs to innovation in the U.S. using linked survey-administrative data on 199,000 firms with a rich set of innovation measures and other firm and owner characteristics. We find that not only are immigrants more likely than natives to own businesses, but on average their firms display more innovation activities and outcomes. Immigrant owned firms are particularly more likely to create completely new products, improve previous products, use new processes, and engage in both basic and applied R&D, and their efforts are reflected in substantially higher levels of patents and productivity. Immigrant owners are slightly less likely than natives to imitate products of others and to hire more employees. Delving into potential explanations of the immigrant-native differences, we study other characteristics of entrepreneurs, access to finance, choice of industry, immigrant self-selection, and effects of diversity. We find that the immigrant innovation advantage is robust to controlling for detailed characteristics of firms and owners, it holds in both high-tech and non-high-tech industries and, with the exception of productivity, it tends to be even stronger in firms owned by diverse immigrant-native teams and by diverse immigrants from different countries. The evidence from nearly all measures that immigrants tend to operate more innovative and productive firms, together with the higher share of business ownership by immigrants, implies large contributions to U.S. innovation and growth.
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Noncitizen Coverage and Its Effects on U.S. Population Statistics
August 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-42
We produce population estimates with the same reference date, April 1, 2020, as the 2020 Census of Population and Housing by combining 31 types of administrative record (AR) and third-party sources, including several new to the Census Bureau with a focus on noncitizens. Our AR census national population estimate is higher than other Census Bureau official estimates: 1.8% greater than the 2020 Demographic Analysis high estimate, 3.0% more than the 2020 Census count, and 3.6% higher than the vintage-2020 Population Estimates Program estimate. Our analysis suggests that inclusion of more noncitizens, especially those with unknown legal status, explains the higher AR census estimate. About 19.8% of AR census noncitizens have addresses that cannot be linked to an address in the 2020 Census collection universe, compared to 5.7% of citizens, raising the possibility that the 2020 Census did not collect data for a significant fraction of noncitizens residing in the United States under the residency criteria used for the census. We show differences in estimates by age, sex, Hispanic origin, geography, and socioeconomic characteristics symptomatic of the differences in noncitizen coverage.
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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
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.
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Covering Undocumented Immigrants: The Effects of a Large-Scale Prenatal Care Intervention
August 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-28
Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for public insurance coverage for prenatal care in most states, despite their children representing a large fraction of births and having U.S. citizenship. In this paper, we examine a policy that expanded Medicaid pregnancy coverage to undocumented immigrants. Using a novel dataset that links California birth records to Census surveys, we identify siblings born to immigrant mothers before and after the policy. Implementing a mothers' fixed effects design, we find that the policy increased coverage for and use of prenatal care among pregnant immigrant women, and increased average gestation length and birth weight among their children.
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The Radius of Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Migration and Local Labor Markets
July 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-27
We examine the geographic incidence of local labor market growth across locations of childhood residence. We ask: when wages grow in a given US labor market, do the benefits flow to individuals growing up in nearby or distant locations? We begin by constructing new statistics on migration rates across labor markets between childhood and young adulthood. This migration matrix shows 80% of young adults migrate less than 100 miles from where they grew up. 90% migrate less than 500 miles. Migration distances are shorter for Black and Hispanic individuals and for those from low income families. These migration patterns provide information on the first order geographic incidence of local wage growth. Next, we explore the responsiveness of location choices to economic shocks. Using geographic variation induced by the recovery from the Great Recession, we estimate the elasticity of migration with respect to increases in local labor market wage growth. We develop and implement a novel test for validating whether our identifying wage variation is driven by changes in labor market opportunities rather than changes in worker composition due to sorting. We find that higher wages lead to increased in-migration, decreased out-migration and a partial capitalization of wage increases into local prices. Our results imply that for a 2 rank point increase in annual wages (approximately $1600) in a given commuting zone (CZ), approximately 99% of wage gains flow to those who would have resided in the CZ in the absence of the wage change. The geographically concentrated nature of most migration and the small magnitude of these migration elasticities suggest that the incidence of labor market conditions across childhood residences is highly local. For many individuals, the 'radius of economic opportunity' is quite narrow.
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