Kate Preston, David Mare, Arthur Grimes (p), Shaan Badenhorst, Stuart Donovan

We examine whether bilateral regional migration flows are driven by the Quality of Business (QB) of a city or by the city’s Quality of Life (QL). The QB and QL measures correspond to those of Chen and Rosenthal who construct each measure based on (quality-adjusted) rents and wages in each city. Following the insights of Rosen and Roback, a city that has high rents and high wages must have productive amenities that enable firms in that location to afford the high factor costs (thus the city has high QB). A city that has high rents and low wages must have attractive consumption amenities to compensate residents for the low real wages in that location (thus the city has high QL). Our measures are constructed for 31 urban areas in New Zealand using five-yearly census data covering 1986 to 2013.

Having compiled these measures of QL and QB, we use a gravity model of regional migration – augmented by destination and origin QL and QB – to model bilateral flows of working-age migrants (post tertiary education and pre-retirement age). We also model flows between these urban areas and rural areas and flows for the urban areas to and from overseas locations. Thus we bring together two well-grounded models from the urban economics literature within a single modelling framework.

Incorporation of international as well as inter-urban migration flows produces evidence of starkly different attractors for international versus domestic migrants according to the type of city amenity. International migrants are much more attracted to cities that are based on productive amenities whereas domestic migrants are more attracted to places with strong consumption amenities. Thus, in deciding on the type of city amenity to enhance (e.g. a port that facilitates business or a concert hall that facilitates consumption), city officials are implicitly choosing the type of migrant that they attract and hence the type of city that may result.

Rafael González-Val (p)

This paper focuses on the spatial city size distribution in Spain. We apply the new distance-based approach by González-Val (2019) to analyse the influence of distance on the city size distribution parameter, by considering the Pareto and lognormal distributions and using data from the Spanish municipalities in 2011. Considering all possible combinations of cities within a 200-km radius, our results indicate that the Pareto distribution cannot be rejected in most cases regardless of city size. Placebo regressions validate our results, thereby confirming the significant effect of geography on the Pareto exponent. This means that the Pareto distribution fits well city size distribution for cities of all sizes as long as they are located nearby. Thus, we emphasize that the proper statistical function of city size distribution (and the fulfilment of Zipf’s law) is a matter of distance, rather than size. On the contrary, the lognormal distribution is only valid for short distances.

Yaning Dong , Yun Gu (p)

This paper constructs an economic geography model for the new spatial economics, exploring the mechanism of the impact of the quality of place on the location choices of heterogeneous talents. Specifically, we build a heterogeneous, talent location choice model after integrating the environment and climate, non-tradeable public services, non-tradeable private services, and accessibility to consumption into a unified framework. Our simulated results show that: 1) improving the environment, public service, and housing supply can increase the welfare of talents, and thus lead to the influx of talents; 2) when choosing between two regions with the same quality of private services, talents migrate in a one-way pattern and agglomerate in the region with higher variety of services; while with differentiated quality in service, a two-way (i.e., moving out and back) migration mechanism appears with a “turning point” affecting talents to move out or back. The quality and variety of, and the accessibility to the consumption of, non-tradable private service influence the “turning point”. Improvements in the variety and intra-regional accessibility to the consumption will promote the talents’ moving back. In addition, improving the inter-regional accessibility to consumption will reduce the migration on both directions.