Graduate migration, partisanship, and city preferences: An experimental approach to place-consonant migration decisions

Abstract

How do university students evaluate prospective jobs in different cities after graduation? While the literature has identified drivers of graduate migration, research has yet to account for the role of individual social and political attitudes in shaping destination preferences. Using a conjoint survey experiment, this paper introduces the concept of place-consonant migration to describe the desire for proximity to like-minded communities with respect to political partisanship. Building on research that has established the utility of experiments in evaluating complex migration decision-making, we provided University of North Carolina at Charlotte undergraduate students with hypothetical job packages to consider upon graduation which combined the city names with randomised levels of income and amenity factors. Adapting to rapidly changing social and political dynamics, we conducted the experiment across three cross-sections of students to capture the potential impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and other social and political developments on the migration decisions of college graduates. The analysis demonstrates how place characteristics combine with individual partisan attitudes to produce place-consonant migration preferences among students. Moreover, by conducting multiple waves of our experiment during contemporaneous social and political events, our results show that place-consonant preferences change over time.