We review patterns in migration within the US over the past thirty years. Internal migration has fallen noticeably since the 1980s, reversing increases from earlier in the century. The decline in migration has been widespread across demographic and socioeconomic groups, as well as for moves of all distances. Although a convincing explanation for the secular decline in migration remains elusive and requires further research, we find only limited roles for the housing market contraction and the economic recession in reducing migration recently. Despite its downward trend, migration within the US remains higher than that within most other developed countries. 1 The notion that one can pick up and move to a location that promises better opportunities has long been an important part of the American mystique. Examples abound, including settlers making the leap over the Appalachians prior to the Revolutionary War; the nineteenth century advice to "Go west, young man, go west" often attributed to newspaper editor Horace Greeley; John Steinbeck's tale of the Joad family heading west in the 1930s to escape the Dust Bowl inThe Grapes of Wrath; and the mid-century Great Black Migration northward out of the poverty of sharecropping and wage labor in the South. Indeed, it is widely believed that internal migration rates in the United States-that is, population flows between regions, states, or cities within a country-are higher than in other countries. This belief is not exactly wrong, but reality is more complex. For example, the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s were not representative of their time, but rather were an exceptional case during a period of markedly low internal migration (Ferrie, 2003; Rosenbloom and Sundstrom, 2004). While the United States has historically had one of the highest migration rates in the world by many measures, citizens of some other countries-including Finland, Denmark and Great Britain-appear equally mobile.Moreover, internal U.S. migration seems to have reached an inflection point around 1980. As shown in Figure 1, the share of the population that had migrated between states trended higher during much of the twentieth century, with the exception of the Great Depression. However, migration rates have been falling in the past several decades, calling into question the extent to which high rates of geographic mobility are still a distinguishing characteristic of the U.S. economy.Economists and other social scientists have been interested in migration for more than a century. In the early decades of the twentieth century, a frequent topic of interest was movement from rural to urban areas (for example, Bachmura, 1959; Harris and Todaro, 1970; and the 2 annotated 1200-paper bibliography from Price and Sikes, 1975). Researchers tended to focus on the social costs of migration, including the "brain drain" from rural areas and the challenges to cities faced with absorbing migrants (Long, 1988, Ch. 1). As decades passed and urbanization of the United States slowed, interest in rural to urban moveme...

We reassess the effect of minimum wages on US earnings inequality using additional decades of data and an IV strategy that addresses potential biases in prior work. We T he rapid expansion of earnings inequality throughout the US wage distribution during the 1980s catalyzed a rich and voluminous literature seeking to trace this rise to fundamental forces of labor supply, labor demand, and labor market institutions. A broad conclusion of the ensuing literature is that while no single factor was solely responsible for rising inequality, the largest contributors included: (i) a slowdown in the supply of new college graduates coupled with steadily rising demand for skills; (ii) falling union penetration, abetted by the sharp contraction of US manufacturing employment early in the decade; and ( An early and influential paper in this literature, Lee (1999), reached a markedly different conclusion. Exploiting cross-state variation in the gap between state median wages and the applicable federal or state minimum wage (the "effective minimum"), Lee estimated the share of the observed rise in wage inequality from

This paper examines the history of internal migration in the United States since the 1980s. By most measures, internal migration in the United States is at a 30-year low. The widespread decline in migration rates across a large number of subpopulations suggests that broad-based economic forces are likely responsible for the decrease. An obvious question is the extent to which the recent housing market contraction and the recession may have caused this downward trend in migration: after all, relocation activity often involves both housing market activity and changes in employment. However, we find relatively small roles for both of these cyclical factors. While we will suggest a few other possible explanations for the recent decrease in migration, the puzzle remains. Finally, we compare U.S. migration to other developed countries. Despite the steady decline in U.S. migration, the commonly held belief that Americans are more mobile than their European counterparts still appears to hold true.

We document a clear downward trend in labor market fluidity that is common across a variety of measures of worker and job turnover. This trend dates to at least the early 1980s if not somewhat earlier. Next we pull together evidence on a variety of hypotheses that might explain this downward trend. It is only partly related to population demographics and is not due to the secular shift in industrial composition. Moreover, the decline in labor market fluidity seems unlikely to have been caused by an improvement in worker-firm matching, the formalization of hiring practices, or an increase in land use regulation or other regulations. Plausible avenues for further exploration include changes in the worker-firm relationship, particularly with regard to compensation adjustment; changes in firm characteristics such as firm size and age; and a decline in social trust, which may have increased the cost of job search or made both parties in the hiring process more risk averse.