THE IMPACT OF HOUSING AFFORDABILITY ON INTERNAL MIGRATION OVER THE LIFE-COURSE

Charles Siriban, Queensland Centre for Population Research, University of Queensland
Aude Bernard, University of Queensland
Jing Wu, University of Queensland
Tom Wilson, Advanced Demographic Modelling

Housing costs are a well-established constraint to internal migration. Rising costs typically reduce inflows while increasing outflows, particularly in large cities. Yet, there is limited evidence on how housing affordability – or the lack of – influences internal migration over the life course. Given the housing affordability crisis experienced in many OECD countries, we investigate how the relationship between housing affordability and internal migration varies by age group. We use Australia as a case study, a country with a high level of internal migration where the rise in housing prices has progressively outstripped real wages growth. We leverage the recent release of origin-destination migration matrices at the labour market level to estimate a Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood regression with origin-destination pair and year fixed effects on annual bilateral migration flows from 2011 to 2022. Preliminary results suggest that housing prices act more as push than a pull factor, particularly among young adults. Our results provide an additional explanation to the age patterns of internal migration. These findings have implications for internal migration trends and for setting migration assumptions for population projections and nowcasting.

Keywords: Internal Migration and Urbanization, Population projections, forecasts, and estimations, Data and Methods

See extended abstract.