On Migration Gravity with Status Quo Bias and Job Search Frictions

Why has internal migration remained low, even as advances in communication technologies have reduced information frictions in relocation decisions? This paper develops and estimates a spatial model of mobility that incorporates status quo bias in locational preferences, multilateral search frictions, and comoving regional unemployment. Using historical proxies for search frictions, we identify and recover county-level estimates of status quo bias across the United States. Status quo bias is spatially heterogeneous and highest in states containing large urban job centers. Translating these estimates into expected-utility, geographic-distance, and state-border equivalents indicates that variation in status quo bias generates migration frictions comparable to large geographic and institutional barriers. Status quo bias also exhibits strong persistence over time, a robust relationship to migration dynamics, and associations with a range of non-wage individual- and community-level correlates of locational preferences (e.g., housing, climate, and religious and political orientations). These patterns suggest that status quo bias partly reflects place-based preferences shaped by individuals' residential histories.