Short-term forecasting of internal migration.

A new methodological approach to the forecasting of short-term trends in internal migration in the United States is introduced. "Panel-data (or longitudinal-data) models are used to represent the relationship between destination-specific out-migration and several explanatory variables. The introduction of this methodology into the migration literature is possible because of some new and improved databases developed by the U.S. Bureau of the Census.... Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis are used to investigate the incorporation of exogenous factors as variables in the model." The exogenous factors considered include employment and unemployment, income, population size of state, and distance between states. The author concludes that "when one...includes additional parameters that are estimable in longitudinal-data models, it turns out that there is little additional information in the exogenous factors that is useful for forecasting."