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Social Dynamics of Geographic Mobility
Abstract
This dissertation examines the dynamics of social factors in motivating geographic mobility in the U.S. in three separate essays. There is little doubt that people are inclined to live in communities where socioeconomic conditions are not less desirable than other communities and with socioeconomic standings that are at least as good as their neighbors in the same community. However, in many cases, these two kinds of social status are unable to be acquired simultaneously, leading to status inconsistency or mismatch. How do the dynamics of these two interrelated but opposite statuses – neighborhood status and individual status – motivate American residents’ relocation tendencies? Using the restricted-use American Community Survey (ACS) data with a finer neighborhood definition, the first essay sets out to answer this question and tests the following models – relative income, spatial assimilation, status signaling, and relative deprivation – to understand American households’ geographic mobility logics. Relying on the same data, the second essay looks into the extent to which white residents are more likely to move out of a community when minority composition is on the rise, especially when their relative socioeconomic standing is not more advantaged than the non-white neighbors. With the inclusion of the notion of neighborhood racial status and the acknowledgment of the intertwined relationship between racial and socioeconomic attributes, this essay amends the conventional racial preferences versus racial proxy framework in the white flight literature. The third essay examines how the migration flows between localities in the U.S. are spurred by the precedent population movement, that is, herd effects. Thus, this essay offers a contemporary picture of the temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal variations of herd effects to understand the endogenous internal dynamics of the U.S. domestic migration system.
Citation
Yen, Shih-Keng (2022). Social Dynamics of Geographic Mobility. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /198014.