Family migration decisions: A dynamic analysis

Between March 1990 and March 1991, 41.5 million, or 17% of all persons in the United States, moved from one residence to another. Although this percentage appears large, there has been a downward trend in migration rates over the last 40 years. In particular, the migration rates for families have dropped by 5.3% between 1965 and 1991. Attempting to explain this drop in family migration, Mincer (1978) proposes a theoretical framework that suggests increasing labor force participation of married women, increasing marital instability, and declining family migration are all strongly interrelated.;In this dissertation, I examine the relationship between family migration, married women's labor force participation, and divorce. I specify the utility maximization problem for the agent as a finite horizon, discrete time, discrete choice, dynamic programming problem. The structural model is estimated, with data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, using simulated maximum likelihood estimation. I find that the number of children in the household deters women from working and deters families from moving. Education decreases the cost of moving and increases the returns to work and marriage. Race has a significant effect only on the returns to marriage. I find that, relative to when the agent is single, it is 19% more costly for an agent to move when he is part of a family. Finally, there is no significant difference between the cost of migration for a family in which both adults work, relative to a family in which only one adult works.;The estimates of the parameters of the dynamic model are used to conduct several comparative static experiments. The comparative static results confirm that the labor force status of wives has no measurable impact on the cost of migration for families. These experiments also demonstrate that changes in the parameters that deter divorce also increase migration, and changes that deter migration also decrease divorce. These results underline the danger associated with treating family composition as exogenous in the migration decision.