US regional income change and migration: 1995–2004

One of the most important concepts found in the migration literature is that it is a selective process, both in terms of who migrates and in the migrants' individual movement trajectories. The selectivity of migration means that the population structure at both origin and destination will change over time through migration, thus influencing the socio‐economic fabric of both sending and receiving regions. In this study we are primarily interested in the selectivity of migration relative to income and how migration affects the distribution of income across metropolitan areas in the U.S. We first cluster metropolitan areas by housing costs and then examine the flow of income migration relative to these costs using IRS county‐to‐county migration data for the years 1994/95 through 2003/04. Both total aggregate and per capita incomes by housing market clusters show some significant changes over the time frame used in this paper with moderate priced housing markets and non‐metropolitan areas the biggest gainers in aggregate income and some high priced housing markets and (once again) nonmetropolitan areas the biggest gainers in per capita income. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.