The migration pathway to economic mobility: Does gender matter?

Abstract

Inter-regional migration is conventionally seen as an important path to economic mobility. We investigate this proposition for Norway, focusing on earnings rank in the 1974 birth cohort. Our data include migrations and educational achievements between 1990 and 2009, with added information for parental background from 1988 to 1992. We measure annual earnings between 1990 and 2014, with measures that capture static effects, dynamic effects and long-term outcomes. Using a structural equation model and fixed-effects regression, we show that upward spatial migration across three geographical levels has different impacts for men and women.The benefit compared with peers who stay at lower levels, or peers who move in the opposite direction, is larger for women. This difference is due to migration before finished education and is linked to employment opportunities in origin locations. Female migrants obtain higher upward economic mobility through increased work hours and shift of industrial sector; that is, women do not obtain higher wage for the same type of work. Much of the difference materialises immediately after relocation ('static effect'); it also depends on destination: Oslo is relatively favourable to women, possibly because this region has a quintessential post-industrial structure and a welldeveloped transport system.

Migration and Skewed Subnational Sex Ratios among Young Adults

“…The findings are consistent with the existing literature on feminization of migration in specific countries or regions, for example, on the higher mobility of women in Western European (Alonso-Villar and Del Río 2008;Camarero and Sampedro 2008;Eckhard and Stauder 2018;Kaberis and Koutsouris 2013;Kröhnert andVollmer 2012), post-communist (Leibert 2016;Stecklov et al 2010) or Nordic countries (Edlund 2005;Wessel and Turner 2021), as well as the higher mobility of men in sub-Saharan Africa (Menashe-Oren and Stecklov 2018).…”

Urban residence as a driver of wealth differentials: New evidence from Norway

“…As illustration, those with greater educational credentials should reap greater earnings gains from residence in the upper realms of the urban hierarchy as they more likely can find jobs better matching their specialized skill sets and can learn faster on the job. These predictions comport with empirical findings from many nations (Baum‐Snow et al, 2018; Baum‐Snow & Pavan, 2012; Carlsen et al, 2016; Wessel & Magnusson Turner, 2021). Men may gain comparatively smaller wage premiums from moving to a city compared with women if the labour market there values interpersonal skills more than physical strength, though the evidence here is mixed (cf.…”

“…We are therefore confident that unmeasured characteristics select particular individuals into higher levels of urbanization, with further consequences for wealth‐building opportunities and/or behaviours. That a nonrandom subset of the Norwegian population migrates from rural to more urbanized places is, of course, a common international finding and in Norway (Carlsen et al, 2016; Wessel & Magnusson Turner, 2021).…”

“…the Norwegian population migrates from rural to more urbanized places is, of course, a common international finding and in Norway(Carlsen et al, 2016;Wessel & Magnusson Turner, 2021).Though more modest than originally estimated in Model (1) due to controlling for geographic selection based on unobserved personal characteristics, the Model (2) fixed-effect estimates nevertheless show that urban residence explains in a plausibly causal way a substantial divergence in net wealth accumulation over the course of the last decade in Norway. Consider first the coefficients for the variables identifying the current level of urbanization in which one resides.…”

“…Men may gain comparatively smaller wage premiums from moving to a city compared with women if the labour market there values interpersonal skills more than physical strength, though the evidence here is mixed (cf. Bacolod, 2017; Phimister, 2005; Puga, 2017; Wessel & Magnusson Turner, 2021). The higher mean levels and greater dispersion of income from labour and capital produced by urban residence will have analogous knock‐on effects for financial wealth (path F).…”