Work, Education, Leisure, or Housing? Disentangling the Drivers of Inter-Urban Youth Migration in Spain

Lidia Bonilla , University of Salamanca
Alberto Del Rey Poveda, University of Salamanca

The internal mobility rates of Spain's young population (18-34 years) have more than doubled since the 1990s, constituting a significant anomaly compared to global trends. This youth dynamism is especially manifest in inter-urban movements, driving severe spatial polarization across Spanish cities. This paper addresses the pressing need to analyze the specific factors driving these complex flows, which lead to urban shrinkage in declining areas and talent concentration in successful metropolises. Our work pursues two objectives. First, we develop four youth opportunity indices (covering work, education, leisure, and housing) to quantify the structural push and pull factors of each Spanish city. Second, we verify the explanatory power of these indices by estimating an extended gravity model using count regression on gross migratory flows for the 2021-2024 period. The model controls for potential biases through variables like distance between cities and return migration (migrant’s city of birth). Expected findings will highlight the heterogeneity of movement motivations. While the model is robust, weak global coefficients can be expected due to the high diversity of trajectories that compensate for each other. To overcome this, the methodology is complemented by a clustering analysis on the flows to identify and describe distinct typologies of movements (e.g., maximizing housing vs. labor opportunities). This approach allows us to thoroughly test the applicability of push-pull theoretical premises to the complex dynamics of the Spanish inter-urban system.

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 Presented in Session 25. Economic Drivers of Internal Migration