Internal migration and house prices in Australia

Abstract

Australia is one of the most mobile countries in the world through internal migration, which is an overlooked part of population change. This study provides the first empirical evidence for the impact of internal migration inflow on house price changes across 237 statistical regions in Australia from 2014 to 2019. Employing a spatial correlation approach and constructing a novel instrumental variable that matches the shift-share instrument used in the immigration literature, the paper indicates that population mobility increases housing prices in migrationreceiving regions. Internal migration that amounts to 1% of the initial local area population is associated with a 0.7% to 0.8% increase in house prices in the three most populated states of Australia. The results provide further suggestive evidence that migration inflow has a significant positive effect on house price changes in metropolitan areas of New South Wales and Victoria -i.e., Capital Cities of Sydney and Melbourne -rather than non-metropolitan regions.

The Inter-Relationships Among Mobility, Housing Prices and Innovation: Evidence From China’s Cities

“…These results show that the increase of inflow population and innovation vitality can drive housing prices up, which is consistent with the findings of many research (Wang et al, 2017b;Moallemi & Melser, 2020;Yu & Cai, 2021;Erol & Unal, 2023). population mobility can not only directly affect the increase of urban housing demand, but also affect the level of urban economic development and urbanization, thus affecting the local real estate industry (Lin et al, 2018).…”

Rethinking Urban Migration: Policy Options for Cities in Latin America and the Caribbean

“…Housing demand encompasses a multifaceted interplay of factors, ranging from individual and household characteristics to global and local economic conditions. Among these Wachter (2011) in the United States; Akbari and Aydede (2012) in Canada; Moallemi and Melser (2020) and Moallemi et al (2021) in Australia; Sá (2015) in the United Kingdom; Selim Hacihasanoglu and Yilmaz (2023) in Turkey, and Gonzalez and Ortega (2013) in Spain-some studies have also assessed the impact of domestic migration; these include Wang, Hui, and Jiu-xia Sun (2017); Depetris-Chauvin and Santos (2018); Howard and Liebersohn (2021); Erol and Unal 2022;and Sharpe (2019). A related literature has studied the effects of gentrification in the United States; see Rosenthal and Ross (2015) for an overview.…”

Local House Price Effects of Internal Migration in Queensland: Australia's Interstate Migration Capital

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