Migration and Intervening Opportunities I. Introduction

Migrants tend to move to regions where wages are high and are deterred by distance, as predicted by human capital theory [3; 4; 5; 7; 10; 18; 19]. But the strength of the effect of distance relative to that of income is too large to be explained by transportation costs, both for advanced and for les...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inSouthern economic journal Vol. 51; no. 2; p. 369
Main Authors Denslow, David A, Eaton, Peter J
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Stillwater Southern Economic Association 01.10.1984
Subjects
Costs
Elasticity
Hypotheses
Migration
Skills
Variables
Wages & salaries
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Migrants tend to move to regions where wages are high and are deterred by distance, as predicted by human capital theory [3; 4; 5; 7; 10; 18; 19]. But the strength of the effect of distance relative to that of income is too large to be explained by transportation costs, both for advanced and for less developed countries [6; 13]. This seeming inordinance of the distance effect has been attributed to increasing cost of information as distance increases, to psychic costs that rise with distance, and to the existence of more intervening opportunities over longer distances. Much of the recent migration literature has concentrated attention on the information and psychic cost hypotheses [7; 8; 11; 16].
ISSN:0038-4038
2325-8012