Who Stays in Their Birthplace? The Role of Intergenerational Birthplace-Ties in Young Adults’ Migration or Staying Behaviour

Jonne Thomassen , University of Groningen
Emma Lundholm , Umeå University
Gunnar Malmberg, Umeå University

Young adults frequently employ internal migration as a strategy for improving chances in education, career prospects, or living conditions. However, migrating away from one’s place of birth may compete with strong feelings of attachment, the benefits of possessing location-specific insider-advantages, and the wish to stay geographically close to family and friends. We aim to identify who stays in the place of birth during young adulthood. We use Swedish population register data from which we select all individuals from three birth cohorts who lived in their place of birth until age 18. Using multinomial logistic regressions, we then model their movements in relation to their place of birth between ages 18 and 30 (i.e., stayed, moved, or returned). We hypothesize that ties to the place of birth are particularly strong for young adults whose families have lived in the same geographic location for multiple generations. We thus test whether young adults who share such intergenerational birthplace-ties are indeed more likely to stay in their place of birth than those who do not. Finally, we investigate the consequences of migrating or staying in the presence or absence of intergenerational birthplace-ties by describing relevant individual outcomes at age 30. Our findings contribute to the (im-)mobility literature by providing a descriptive profile of young adults who stay in their place of birth and by extending the range of local ties that may act as constraints to migration to include the presence of intergenerational birthplace-ties.

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 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe