Our study examines several factors affecting migration choice among US urban areas, with emphasis on a factor currently at the center of policy discussions: housing affordability. Aggregating county-to-county IRS migration data for core-based statistical areas in each of the 48 continental US states from 2014 through 2020, we implement a zero-inflated negative binomial model to estimate the effect of house price and rent differentials on migration choice. Our findings confirm that housing affordability is a relocation barrier that results in a loss of productivity and economic growth for the US economy. We also show that using an average measure of housing affordability masks important effects and reveal that differences in house prices greater than 50, 000 and rents greater than 250 are thresholds for negatively impacting migration choice.
Hodge et al. (Sun,) studied this question.