Johnny Goes to Town

Cities have been gaining inhabitants for many centuries now, even as the countryside dwellers dwindle. The reasons? Many, and varied: safety in numbers, superior job and career prospects, quicker access to services and so on. But did you suspect people, particularly young ones, might be moving into town because of marriage-market considerations?

That was the intriguing question CESifo Research Network fellow Coen Teulings and his colleagues Pieter Gautier and Michael Svarer tried to elucidate in their latest CESifo Working Paper. They started from the idea that cities are dense places where singles can meet more potential partners than in rural areas. To enjoy these benefits, singles are willing to pay a premium in terms of higher housing prices. Once married, the benefits from meeting more potential partners (at least legally) vanish and the countryside becomes more attractive. The fact that searches are more efficient in dense areas suggests that attractive types benefit most from moving into the city: with so much supply available, they can afford to be choosy.

The authors put their model to the data (using a Danish dataset) and, bingo, that is exactly what they discovered Johnny does in the real world: he heads for town as a single youngblood and back to the countryside once he's found his partner. The same holds for single girls, particularly the more attractive ones.

But, as good economists, the authors subjected their model to a number of tests and refinements. For one thing, they created attractiveness indices consisting of a linear combination of education, income, parents' education and parents' income. Then, they tested the sensitivity of their results to different definitions of attractiveness and cities.

In Denmark, most universities are located in the big cities, so there is a certain likelihood that young people move into the city to get an education, not to look for a wedding partner. That they usually get married in the process is just a collateral effect: colleges and universities are, after all, very good marriage markets, as they select fairly homogeneous groups of well-educated people, usually single and belonging to the same age group.

So it made sense to check whether the model holds in the absence of colleges. To do this, the authors took sub-samples of individuals older than 25, an age in which the college decision has already been made. Presumably, the motivation of these individuals to move to the city cannot be the presence of colleges. The results, they found, do hold very well under these conditions.

Married couples could move to rural areas because they plan to get a progeny, not because they have already completed their mission of catching a partner. In that case, the reason to move to the countryside reflects the wish for more space, for a healthier environment for their kids. In order to rule out such motivations, the researchers considered only individuals who never have kids. Again, they found that their results are robust for those exclusions.

Then they repeated their analysis for different definitions of "city", paring it down even to the borough level. They used population density as a yardstick. The results still held true: when young, people head for the places with a higher concentration of potential partners.

There is still the "life-cycle" question, i.e., that people are lured to the city when they are young because at that stage they have a relatively strong preference for bars, discos, cinemas and assorted city amenities, but that they leave for the countryside when these amenities start to lose their lustre and they develop instead a strong preference for land.

As a way to isolate the "partner search" motive, the authors considered the mobility patterns of couples who have moved to the countryside and then got divorced there: if the marriage-market model holds, they should move back to the city once they have become single again. If, on the contrary, they had moved out to the countryside because of life-cycle motives, they would stay there after divorcing. The finding? They do move back to town once divorced.

Still, this could just be a result of the fact that divorcees are anyway more likely to move, a side effect of their newly-attained unattached status. So, the authors compared the likelihood for divorced individuals to move into the city with their likelihood to move out of the city. In the second year after divorce, they found, both men and women show a higher propensity to move into the city than out of it.

So, whichever way you look at it, the findings appear to be quite robust: the Bright Lights, Big City lure appeals much more strongly to unattached mobile countryside dwellers on the prowl. Sex and the City maidens better watch out.

• Other CESifo Working Papers dealing with marriage
• Other CESifo Working Papers dealing with the city
• Other CESifo Working Papers by Coen Teulings

Note: This text is the responsibility of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of either the CESifo Working Paper author(s) cited or the CESifo Group Munich.