Volume 6, Number 3 (Summer) 1971
Grossack, Irvin M., and Richard L. Pfister. 1971. "Estimating Patterns of Labor Mobility." Journal of Human Resources 6(3):345-357.
This article develops some novel and fairly simple statistical techniques that enable an analyst to infer the geographic movement of a selected group of workers for which only its geographic distribution at two points in time is known. By making use of the known movements of some reference group expressed as a transition matrix, one can determine what the hypothetical distributions would have been if the selected group had moved in the same pattern as the reference group. The differences between the hypothetical and actual distributions for the selected group permit some interesting inferences regarding movement between regions. These techniques can be applied to a variety of problems other than those considered in the article.
The authors are on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business, Indiana University. We would like to thank our colleague, A. V. Cabot, for his comments on an earlier draft. One of our students, Steve Moore, deserves credit for the extensive calculations.
© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X