Using urban migration flows for non-market amenity valuation
Presented by:
Adam Theising
Practice Job Talk
Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Wednesday, October 7, 2020
12:00 pm-1:30 pm
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Economists often use a household's residential location as a revealed preference for place. This paper studies what a household's previous location -- their residence during the migration decision -- can add to our understanding of tastes for regionally-varying environmental amenities. We show evidence of heterogeneous migration propensities across space, and find a correlation between the "stickiness" of a place and its quality of life. This motivates our development and estimation of a generalized national-level sorting model that accommodates heterogeneity in migration costs across origins. Our demand framework uses structure similar to gravity models of migration. We leverage this structure to identify our key parameters from variation in spatial differences of migration flows across origins and destinations. As a result, this model exists in a single temporal cross-section; notably, our flow approach produces credible estimates without relying on temporal variation. In our empirical application, we estimate our model on a national sample of US households who sort among metropolitan statistical areas, and report marginal willingness to pay values for climate amenities and air quality.
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