Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper documents a new stylized fact about the United States labor market: internal migration rates are dramatically different across college majors. At a detailed level of location and major, we relate the spatial concentration of a major with major-specific outcomes such as earnings, unemployment, labor force participation, and migration. Differences in the spatial concentration of college majors explain a large amount of the cross-major variation in non-earnings outcomes. With the descriptive evidence as a guide, we estimate a structural model of locational choice where people have heterogeneous preferences---at the detailed major level---for living close to home, and for working in a place with a high concentration of their fellow majors. Using estimates of the structural model, we examine the impact of policies that seek to attract skilled labor to a location. Our findings highlight the importance of place in determining the outcomes of college majors, and the importance of measuring human capital investment and utilization at refined levels.