Interregional Migration: Who Decides to Move?

The functionality of a region depends on its people. Yet for some regions within Australia, attracting and retaining varied skilled people continues to be a challenge. What influences people to want to stay, move away from or move into a region? Before we can answer this question, we firstly need to understand ‘who’ is making this decision. Much of past research assumes the decision is made at the individual head of household level or must assume the decision is made at the individual as opposed to the household level as a result of data availability. This paper highlights the limitations of making such an assumption and offers an alternative method transforming secondary microdata to reflect the collective household unit as the decision making unit. We find that our migration models are statistically robust with results consistent with conventional studies that show smaller, younger households are more mobile. Most importantly, however, we find evidence that our proxies which represent characteristics of the collective unit, termed “Decision Making Unit”, are also statistically significant. Thus, justifying the need for migration models to reflect the collective unit and not just the individual, should we seek to better understand motives.