Kennan John, Walker James R
University of Wisconsin-Madison and NBER.
J Econom. 2010 May 1;156(1):229-238. doi: 10.1016/j.jeconom.2009.09.019. Epub 2009 Sep 18.
Differences in economic opportunities give rise to strong migration incentives, across regions within countries, and across countries. In this paper we focus on responses to differences in welfare benefits across States. We apply the model developed in Kennan and Walker (2008), which emphasizes that migration decisions are often reversed, and that many alternative locations must be considered. We model individual decisions to migrate as a job search problem. A worker starts the life-cycle in some home location and must determine the optimal sequence of moves before settling down. The model is sparsely parameterized. We estimate the model using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979). Our main finding is that income differences do help explain the migration decisions of young welfare-eligible women, but large differences in benefit levels provide surprisingly weak migration incentives.
经济机会的差异引发了强烈的移民动机，这种差异存在于一个国家内部的不同地区之间，也存在于不同国家之间。在本文中，我们关注的是对各州福利差异的反应。我们应用了凯南和沃克（2008年）开发的模型，该模型强调移民决策往往会逆转，而且必须考虑许多替代地点。我们将个人的移民决策建模为一个求职问题。一名工人在某个家乡地区开始其生命周期，并且必须在定居之前确定最优的迁移顺序。该模型的参数设置较少。我们使用来自全国青年纵向调查（1979年）的数据来估计该模型。我们的主要发现是，收入差异确实有助于解释符合福利条件的年轻女性的移民决策，但福利水平的巨大差异所提供的移民动机却出奇地微弱。
