I document a new empirical pattern of internal mobility in the United States. Namely, county-to-county migration and commuting drop off discretely at state borders. People are three times as likely to move to a county 15 miles away, but in the same state, than to move to an equally distant county in a different state. These gaps remain even among neighboring counties or counties in the same commuting zone. Standard economic explanations, which emphasize differences in utility or moving costs, have little explanatory power.
Cross-border differences in observables, amenities, state occupational licensing, taxes, or transfer program generosity do not explain this border effect. However, county-to-county social connectedness (as measured by the number of Facebook linkages) follows a similar pattern, and there is suggestive evidence that this is driven by a so-called "home state bias," rather than alternative explanations such as information frictions or network ties. I show that this reluctance to cross state lines has real economic costs, resulting in local labor markets that are less dynamic after negative economic shocks.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.