The effect of labour-market differentials on interregional migration in Spain: A meta-regression analysis

Abstract

This paper performs a meta-regression analysis to derive the role of techniques, data and variable's definition on the effect of the labor-market determinants on interregional migration. We use Spain as a case of study, a country with heterogeneous and even counterintuitive behavior of internal migration flows to its labor-market drivers. We use data from studies released over the last 40 years. The results show that migration flows respond to labor-market differentials in a theoretically consistent way. We find that the vast diversity in the studies' attributes is behind the significant heterogeneity of their estimated effects. Differences in aggregation level, variables measures, model specification, and the national economic context influence the identification of the push and pull effects.