Dwindling U.S. internal migration: Evidence of spatial equilibrium or structural shifts in local labor markets?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines whether the significant downward shift in U.S. gross migration rates after 2000 is indicative of the economy nearing a stationary spatial equilibrium. Nearness to spatial equilibrium would imply that site-specific factors such as amenities and location within the urban hierarchy have little influence on migration because their values have been capitalized into prices, causing interregional utility levels to become approximately equal. Yet, in an examination of U.S. counties, we find empirical evidence of only a mild ebbing of natural amenity-based migration after 2000 and little slowing of population redistribution from peripheral towards core urban areas. Instead, the primary finding is a downward shift in the responsiveness of population to spatially asymmetric demand shocks post-2000, and associated increased responsiveness of local area labor supply, more consistent with European regional labor markets. Quantile regression analysis suggests that this shift does not relate to a difference in regional labor market tightness across the two decades
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".