Shaped by Urban-Rural Divide and Skill: the Drivers of Internal Mobility in Italy

This paper examines the evolution and determinants of skill-specific internal mobility among Italian citizens by urban-rural origin. Using administrative data from the Registry of Transfer of Residence (ADELE), which records the universe of skill-specific bilateral moves across more than 700 millions potential municipality pairs between 2012 and 2022, we document distinct trends in residential mobility for college-educated and non-college-educated citizens. We then assess the role of economic and non-economic factors in shaping these flows, employing a Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimator with an extensive set of destination and origin-by-nest fixed effects. Our findings show that low-skilled movers respond more strongly to economic factors, while high-skilled movers are respond more to non-economic ones, with the urban-rural divide at origin amplifying these differences. Moreover, we find that after the COVID-19 pandemic, economic drivers became less relevant, whereas non-economic factors gained importance. Overall, this study highlights that, similar to international migration, the drivers of internal mobility are inherently skill-specific.