CSI’s Inequality Discussion Groups bring together Cornell faculty and graduate students from around campus to discuss and improve their in-progress research.

Haowen Zheng (Sociology, Cornell)

Title: Occupational Restructuring and the Decline of Internal Migration across Local Labor Markets by College Status, 1980-2019

Abstract: Internal migration within the United States—movement across states, metropolitan areas, and commuting zones—has declined since the 1980s, yet its causes are insufficiently explained. In addition, the understanding of how migration patterns vary by sociodemographic characteristics, particularly college attainment, remains limited. These key gaps are especially relevant given occupational polarization, which has reshaped local labor markets through the expansion of high-paying professional-managerial jobs and low-wage service jobs, alongside the decline of routine manual and nonmanual occupations due to automation, outsourcing, and deindustrialization. This project employs a discrete choice modeling framework to examine how local occupational structures influence migration patterns by college status, accounting for various labor market contexts and individual socio-demographics. Preliminary findings indicate that local markets with higher shares of white-collar jobs have become increasingly favored migration destinations, a trend that strengthened from 1980 to 2019, particularly among college-educated workers. In contrast, while a higher share of skilled manual jobs was positively associated with migration in 1980, this relationship turned negative and null by 2019. Local markets with a prevalence of unskilled manual and service jobs, however, do not appear to attract migrants. Further analysis will quantify the extent to which occupational restructuring has driven changes in migration rates.