Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In recent years, there has been substantial interest in understanding urban systems at the national and global scales: what are the economic and social ties that link cities together, and what is the netw o)rk structure formed by such ties?At the saime time, human capital accumulation is increasingly seen as a, primary driver of regional ec()nomic growth.Doimnestic migration patterns have the potential to illuminate the social and economlic connections among cities, while also highlighting economi( ally significant fows of111 human capital.In this thesis I examine the US city system through the lens of gross migrat ion flows, taking advantage of unusually complete data on county-to-county migration cornpiled annually by the IRS.I compare the observed flows to those predicted] by the raliation model.finling most notably that there are far more lo ng-distance migrants than would be predicted based on the spatial (listribution of population alone.I then use reciprocal migration patterns to construct a migration network connecting metro areas in the United States.I utilize current-flow centrality measures to identifv the most prolinent nodes in this wvveighted network.Additionally, I use repeated applications of the Louvain community detection algoritmin to identify reasonably robust communities within the migration network.These exhibit a striking degree of spatial contiguity.
Author: Robert Manduca
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2267590445