Reevaluating the Relationship Between In‐, Out‐, and Net Migration for Nonmetropolitan Counties: An Update on Beale's U‐Shaped Curve

Abstract

The relationship of gross migration to net migration is continuously undergoing reevaluation in the literature. However, one mjorJinding by Beale (1969) Over the past thirty years, geographers and other social scientists studying migration processes have had to contend with a series of empirical findings that often appeared to contradict intuitive ideas and explanations for population change. For example, Lowry (1966) found that while economic conditions in destination regions influenced the places people migrated to, economic conditions in the region of origin did not appear to have any relationship to out-migration rates. Another unusual empirical finding centered on gross migration rates, where researchers showed that gross in-migration rates vary tremendously from place to place, while out-migration rates often show little or no variation (Lowry 1966; Cordey-Hayes 1975).In each case mentioned above, researchers utilized better data and techniques to note patterns that had gone undetected until that time. After each surprising empirical finding, researchers had to reevaluate existing theory to develop new mechanisms and ideas that explain the migration patterns found. One such extension was Beale's (1969) study on migration changes taking place in rural areas of the United States.

The estimation and interpretation of coefficients in panel gravity models of migration

“…We test these ideas by means of data on migration flows between the sixteen regions of New Zealand. Inter-regional migration data were obtained from the Census of Population and Dwellings (1996, 2001, 2006and 2013, based on self-reported region of residence 5 years previously. Responses that were unidentifiable or not elsewhere classified were distributed proportional to valid responses (including non-movers), while the few zero-count flows were increased by one (for estimation in the case where some flows are structurally zero, see e.g.…”

“…This simply requires the assumption that the time-varying population growth rates are exogenous. This assumption is plausible because there is no correlation between gross migration levels and net migration or population growth rates, even though gross inward (outward) migration is positively (negatively) correlated with net migration, see Vias (2001). Given the assumption of white noise errors, the RLS or OLS estimators of (5) are BLU (Greene 2017).…”