Voting with your feet: Political competition and internal migration in the United States |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Environmental Economics and Management, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel;2. Department of Environmental Economics and Management and the Center for Agricultural Economic Research, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel;1. Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA;2. Department of Economics and Business Administration, Ariel University, Ariel, 40700, Israel;1. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad, Karnataka, 580011, India;2. Department of Economic Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, 208016, India |
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| Abstract: | Do people “vote with their feet” in response to a lack of political competition? Since political competition is associated with higher growth and welfare, with the free movement of labour, we argue that it should also encourage inward migration. We test this hypothesis by using data from the US and find a strong positive relation between political competition and net migration. This result is robust to alternative specifications, alternative samples and addressing endogeneity using the Voting Rights Act to instrument for political competition. The effect is economically large, specifically, we find that an increase in political competition in the order of magnitude observed in US Southern states during the post-war period leads to an increase in net migration by between 27 and 44 individuals per 1000 population. |
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| Keywords: | Political competition Internal migration Welfare Voting rights act D72 J61 H70 N92 |
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