Thomas De Graaff (p)

Viktor Venhorst

This paper revisits the impact of the housing market structure on interregional migration, but adopts an alternative modeling approach to migration flows between cities. The starting point is a gravity model, but instead of using fixed effects for cities of origin and destination, I use a multilevel mixed effects approach allowing me to simultaneously model migration flow characteristics and the cities of origin and destination characteristics. This approach has two main advantages. First, it allows for simultaneous estimation of the impact of city characteristics on migration flows, where the impact is not necessarily symmetrical for cities of origin and destination. Second, it allows for prediction of migration flows between cities both in and out of sample. Preliminary results show that homeownership decrease migration flows significantly with an elasticity below -1. Municipal social renting rate has a negative impact as well, but its elasticity is close to zero.

Jaako Simonen (p), Santtu Karhinen, Rauli Svento, Philip McCann

Thomas De Graaff

Current literature provides very few empirical studies where labour mobility has been clearly linked to the spatial distribution of activities, especially over the industry life cycle. In this paper we analyse how regional features, e. g. regional amenities, industrial structures as well as individual characteristics of employees affect regional labour mobility along the industry life-cycles of high technology sector. In order to do this, we employ panel data on the regional and industrial labour mobility of the Finnish high technology firms and regional economies. Our findings show that structure of the high technology sector as well as regional economic and amenity variables and individual characteristics of employees have an influence on the migration decisions of the high technology workers, although their roles vary in within-region and across-region mobility as well as at the different stages of the industry life-cycles. Moreover, the role of regional economic factors are analysed from the point of view of the origin and receiving region.

Note: Our paper (attached) will be updated before June 2019

Viktor Venhorst (p)

Jaako Simonen

It is generally reported that short distance moves are associated with residential motives whereas longer distance moves are more often related to labour market or educational motives. Yet, at the same time, in the Graves -Linneman type of frameworks moves are viewed more in terms of a trade off with migrants willing to trade labour market outcomes for untradeable local amenities. Such untradeable amenities can include family networks. Such networks might be instrumental in finding better matches in labour and residential markets, but moving closer to or away from family might be a goal in its own right as well. This suggests that looking at migration as a multi faceted decision, rather than a one dimensional work - housing dichotomy might prove fruitful in deepening our understanding of what drives interregional migration. Even if a longer distance move is undertaken for the primary motive of finding work, secondary motives may prove vital in making the ultimate decision as to whether to move at all, and if so what the destination might be.
In this paper we will investigate primary and secondary motives for migration. We will try and establish which combinations of primary and secondary motives occur, and what their prevalence is. We will investigate whether there are differences between subgroups that have received ample attention in the literature, such as young recent graduates, families, elderly. In particular, we investigate to what extent more classic motives such as labour, education and residence, coincide with motives related to family networks. Furthermore we investigate whether different profiles are associated with different migration outcomes.
Data (Niedomysl et al, 2009): This paper uses survey data collected in collaboration with Statistics Sweden in spring 2007 via a postal questionnaire sent to a stratified sample of 10,000 Swedish migrants, of a total population of 244,704 migrants who had moved at least 20 km in 2006.
The dataset has been used in motive research before (Niedomysl et al 2009, 2011), looking into the relationship between migration motives and return migration for example. Specifically we will use the questions on primary and secondary motives, and on specific reasons to either stay or leave particular areas.