International migrants may relocate because of economic, political and social factors in their origin or destination countries. Using global bilateral migration flows from 103 countries over the period 1990–2000, we explore whether emigrants self‐select based on economic, political and social institutions. Our study adds social dimension as a potential determinant of migration and separates the pull and push effects of political, economic and social institutions. Our results indicate that economic, political and social institutions are significant pull factors of migration; economic freedom has the most substantial pull effect followed by the political institutions; social institutions have the weakest pull effect on migration. Moreover, economic and social institutions are significant push factors of migration, while political institutions do not show any push effect. Furthermore, educated migrants are more sensitive to the destination economic, political and social institutions than less‐educated migrants, and less‐educated migrants are more sensitive to the social institutions at the origin.

We examine the determinants of intra‐U.S. population migration at the metropolitan area level (MSA), with an emphasis on the presence of policies that are consistent with economic freedom. We are the first to produce a multivariate regression analysis of migration and economic freedom at the local level. Combining a 1993–2014 unbalanced panel of MSA‐to‐MSA migration data from the Internal Revenue Service with a new economic freedom index for U.S. metropolitan areas, we find that a 10% increase in economic freedom of a destination MSA, relative to the economic freedom of an origin MSA, was associated with a 27.4% increase in net migration from the origin MSA to the destination MSA. If we use mean net migration flows as a benchmark, we would expect a 10% increase in relative economic freedom to increase net migration to the destination MSA by 22 workers per year from each other MSA.

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