Mobility, mixing and neighbourhood change: a British perspective

The articles in this symposium highlight three important areas of inquiry related to residential mobility—what constitutes mobility, the processes of mobility, and the effects of mobility on different groups and locations. In each of these areas, the challenge of understanding becomes more difficult as research reveals the complexity of the underlying processes. Further, our consideration of these challenges helps to identify the integral link between residential mobility studies and research on neighborhood effects (Hedman and van Ham, 2012)

Job and residential mobility in the Netherlands: the influence of human capital, household composition and location

This study identifies and evaluates determinants of employees’ job and residential mobility. It examines mobility of fulltime employees in selected sectors in 2003/2004, using register data provided by Statistics Netherlands. We estimate a multinomial model of job and residential change. The results illustrate that individuals decide upon changing jobs and/or relocating by taking into account the strength of their family- and job-related ties. We also find that the prevalence of internal versus external career opportunities impedes job changes. While a high salary facilitates relocation, our findings regarding the effect of salary on interfirm mobility were inconclusive. A long commuting distance encourages (simultaneous) job and housing mobility, while being situated in the municipality of a large city encourages employees to either change jobs, or to relocate.Job mobility, residential mobility, regional migration, human capital

Residential mobility and childhood leukemia.

AimsStudies of environmental exposures and childhood leukemia studies do not usually account for residential mobility. Yet, in addition to being a potential risk factor, mobility can induce selection bias, confounding, or measurement error in such studies. Using data collected for California Powerline Study (CAPS), we attempt to disentangle the effect of mobility.MethodsWe analyzed data from a population-based case-control study of childhood leukemia using cases who were born in California and diagnosed between 1988 and 2008 and birth certificate controls. We used stratified logistic regression, case-only analysis, and propensity-score adjustments to assess predictors of residential mobility between birth and diagnosis, and account for potential confounding due to residential mobility.ResultsChildren who moved tended to be older, lived in housing other than single-family homes, had younger mothers and fewer siblings, and were of lower socioeconomic status. Odds ratios for leukemia among non-movers living <50 meters (m) from a 200+ kilovolt line (OR: 1.62; 95% CI: 0.72-3.65) and for calculated fields ≥ 0.4 microTesla (OR: 1.71; 95% CI: 0.65-4.52) were slightly higher than previously reported overall results. Adjustments for propensity scores based on all variables predictive of mobility, including dwelling type, increased odds ratios for leukemia to 2.61 (95% CI: 1.76-3.86) for living < 50 m from a 200 + kilovolt line and to 1.98 (1.11-3.52) for calculated fields. Individual or propensity-score adjustments for all variables, except dwelling type, did not materially change the estimates of power line exposures on childhood leukemia.ConclusionThe residential mobility of childhood leukemia cases varied by several sociodemographic characteristics, but not by the distance to the nearest power line or calculated magnetic fields. Mobility appears to be an unlikely explanation for the associations observed between power lines exposure and childhood leukemia

Movers or Stayers? Heterogeneity of Older Adults' Residential Profiles Across Continental Europe

Traditionally, the emotional attachment older adults have to their homes and the economic and health burden caused by residential moves have had a deterrent effect on mobility during old age. In spite of this static general trend, 20% of older Europeans change their residential location after the age of 65. Some studies point out that this percentage will increase in the coming decades along with the onset of baby-boom cohorts reaching older ages. The main objective of this article is to describe the residential mobility trends during old age in some European countries and identify the main features of those elderly that move after 65, using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)

Tax Policies and Residential Mobility

Governmental tax policies have direct consequences for public spending and the distribution of wealth among a country’s population. But unintended consequences may also occur as a result of the design of those policies. We illustrate the potential impact of such unintended consequences by analyzing differences in home ownership mobility in California, Illinois, and Massachusetts that appear to result from the distinct differences in the design of real estate tax polices across these states. California’s Proposition 13, which became law in 1978, limits the increase in real estate taxes to a maximum of 2% in any given year regardless of home value appreciation. With home value appreciation, Proposition 13 creates sizeable disincentives to move. The evidence from an analysis of single family home sales records in California, Illinois, and Massachusetts indicates that California’s homeowners are significantly less mobile than their counterparts in Illinois and Massachusetts. The lower mobility was clearly not intended by the passage of Proposition 13, though its impact on society is potentially very significant. We recommend that countries in the process of developing tax systems for residential real estate ownership (such as China, the countries of the former USSR, and many countries in Africa) take account of such originally unintended consequences.California, Real Estate Tax, Residential Mobility, Unintended effect

Residential Mobility and Social Capital

This paper empirically investigates the role of social capital in households’residential mobility behavior by considering its spatial dimension. This study focuses on a household’s social ties with people living nearby, which we refer to as its “local social capital”. Local social capital may deter residential mobility, because the resources stemming from them are location-specific and will be less valuable if a household moves. We conjecture that a household’s possession of local social capital has a negative effect on its residential mobility, and this negative effect of local social capital may be stronger on long-distance mobility than on short-distance mobility. Our empirical investigation is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We obtain evidence which is supportive of these conjectures.

Residential Mobility of the European Elderly

With the ageing of the European population, the housing choices of the elderly will have consequences on the whole housing market. In this paper we use data from the first two waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to analyse the residential mobility decisions of the elderly and the factors influencing them in eleven European countries.housing, ageing, residential mobility, housing policy

Assessing the bias due to non-coverage of residential movers in the German microcensus panel: an evaluation using data from the socio-economic panel

The German Microcensus (MC) is a large scale rotating panel survey over three years. The MC is attractive for longitudinal analysis over the entire participation duration because of the mandatory participation and the very high case numbers (about 200 thousand respondents). However, as a consequence of the area sampling that is used for the MC , residential mobility is not covered and consequently statistical information at the new residence is lacking in theMCsample. This raises the question whether longitudinal analyses, like transitions between labour market states, are biased and how different methods perform that promise to reduce such a bias. Based on data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which covers residential mobility, we analysed the effects of missing data of residential movers by the estimation of labour force flows. By comparing the results from the complete SOEP sample and the results from the SOEP, restricted to the non-movers, we concluded that the non-coverage of the residential movers can not be ignored in Rubins sense. With respect to correction methods we analysed weighting by inverse mobility scores and loglinear models for partially observed contingency tables. Our results indicate that weighting by inverse mobility scores reduces the bias to about 60 percent whereas the official longitudinal weights obtained by calibration result in a bias reduction of about 80 percent. The estimation of loglinear models for nonignorable nonresponse leads to very unstable results. --Panel survey,labour market analysis,residential mobility,non-coverage bias,log-linear modelling,inverse probability weighting

Following people through time : an analysis of individual residential mobility biographies

Maarten van Ham’s contribution to this research was partly made possible through the financial support of the EU Marie Curie programme under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / Career Integration Grant n. PCIG10-GA-2011-303728 (CIG Grant NBHCHOICE, Neighbourhood choice, neighbourhood sorting, and neighbourhood effects).The life course framework guides us towards investigating how dynamic life course careers affect residential mobility decision-making and behaviour throughout long periods of individual lifetimes. However, most longitudinal studies linking mobility decision-making to subsequent moving behaviour focus only on year-to-year transitions. This study moves beyond this snapshot approach by analysing the long-term sequencing of moving desires and mobility behaviour within individual lives. Using novel techniques to visualise the desire–mobility sequences of British Household Panel Survey respondents, the study demonstrates that revealing the meanings and significance of particular transitions in moving desires and mobility behaviour requires these transitions to be arranged into mobility biographies. The results highlight the oft-neglected importance of residential stability over the life course, uncovering groups of individuals persistently unable to act in accordance with their moving desires.PostprintPeer reviewe