On his blog on the Washington Post website, Ezra Klein linked to a NBER paper that states that “By most measures, internal migration in the United States is at a 30-year low.” This is particularly relevant to discussion of mobility as a key assumption in the Tiebout model.
Klein’s article points out that the fall in migration is largely because of: “technological advances” that have reduced “the need for workers to move,” locations that are “less specialized and in what kind of goods and services they produce,” and changing social trends as less Americans are “moving for matrimony.”
Interestingly, the first of these reduces the cost of moving between communities. According to Tiebout, this should increase migration. However, the homogenization of locations has also reduced the benefits of moving. This should reduce migration. It is difficult to see exactly how the changing marriage trends should be interpreted in the Tiebout model. This then seems to demonstrate that even if close to perfect mobility is being achieved, migration may fall if communities cease to differentiate themselves from each other.
1 comment:
Perhaps the communities are still just as distinct as ever....but because the federal government began its massive expansion in the 1980s, these differences between municipalities is negligible. Since the publishing of Tiebout's article, the federal government has ballooned in size compared to state and local governments.
Because federal government action distributes costs over the entire nation, the relative gains from relocating decrease.
Post a Comment