Are Migrants More Skilled than Non-Migrants? Repeat, Return, and Same-Employer Migrants

I examine the determinants of inter-state migration of adults within western Germany, using the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2000. Migrants who do not change employers represent one-fifth of all migrants and have higher education and pre-move wages than non-migrants. Skilled workers thus have a low-cost migration avenue that has not been considered in the previous literature. Other migrants are heterogeneous and not unambiguously more skilled than non-migrants. I confirm that long-distance migrants are more skilled than short-distance migrants, as predicted by theory, and I show that return migrants are a mix of successes and failures. Most repeat migration is return migration