Location Decisions and Preferences for Home and Family

Patrick Coate, Duke University

This paper investigates the reason for the strong preference for home found in structural models of migration. Specifically, the goal is to disentangle preferences for a place as opposed to preference for family, particularly focusing on non-coresident parents. The secondary goal of the paper is to evaluate the impact migration and family have on wages. This includes foregone opportunities to increase wages from refusing to move and pass up the home (or family) bonus. The model also allows for job opportunities to be found more easily in familiar locations or near family. Preliminary evidence suggests that family proximity does play an important role in what has been considered the home bonus, and the wage impact of staying near family is vastly different across education groups.