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Location-Specific
Human Capital, Migration and Amenities
URAG Working Paper #04-06
Location-Specific Human Capital, Migration and Amenities (pdf)
by Douglas Krupka, September 2004
Keywords: location-specific capital, human capital, migration
People move for many reasons. Certainly life-cycle considerations and regional income differences have substantial effects on human migration, but a host of finer considerations influences individuals' decisions to relocate perhaps as much. Specifically, spatial differences in the returns to a person's human capital will influence a population's spatial distribution at the aggregate and people's location/migration decisions at the individual level. Intuitively, such differences should play an important role in determining people's migration decisions by affecting their relative real income in various places. The loss of returns on locally effective human capital at original locations probably constitutes an important part of the costs of human migration. This paper uses the concept of location-specific human capital to build on previous work on amenities, human capital, migration, and regional labor market dynamics to develop a simple model of people's migration behavior.
Comments and questions regarding this paper may be directed to Douglas Krupka at dkrupka@gsu.edu.