Family relations, children and interregional mobility, 1970 to 2000

During the last three decades, there has been a rapid increase in female labor force participation rates. This increase has gradually changed the family concept. Today, women and men both work and contribute to family earnings so that dual-earner households has become the rule rather the single-earner households. A popular view is that the growth in female labor supply has reduced the incentives to migrate for families were both spouses work. With both spouses working migration decisions becomes a rather complicated process. In particular if both spouses are to find new jobs, regions has to be diversified enough to offer career opportunities for both spouses. Children are generally supposed to trigger local migration, but to decrease long distance migration. <p> The objective of this paper is to examine how family formation, the arrival of children and family dissolution has influenced migration rates during the period 1970-2000. Determinants of migration are analyzed using Cox proportional hazard regressions. The empirical analysis is based on the longitudinal database LINDA expanded with information on births for children and when geographical moves took place in time. <p> According to the results family formation, the presence of children and family dissolutions has all been important for the interregional migration patterns in Sweden during the last three decades. The presence of family ties thereby seems to be of vital importance for the decision to migrate. The findings indicate that family formation and presence of children lowers the propensity for migration while family dissolution seems to trigger migration. Furthermore, the estimations indicate that migration propensities have decreased over the three last decades. This finding might be related to the rapid increase in female labor force participation rates during the observed period.