Disentangling the role of migrants’ educational level in the long-run Italian internal migration trends

Previous studies on Italian internal migration have shown that income differentials are more effective than unemployment differentials in driving interregional reallocation of population across regions. In this paper we follow the macroeconomic empirical literature on migration and test the role that has been played by relative per capita GDP and relative unemployment rates differentials in shaping long-run internal migration. In addition, we split total migration into high- and low-skilled net migration and highlight the different pattern of these two variables in the long-run trend. Finally, we extend the model and introduce the population age structure and the population density. Differently from almost all existing literature, we investigate the dynamic characteristics of the series and study interregional migration inside a cointegration framework