Internal Migration in Italy: The Role of Migration Networks

This paper investigates the role of migration networks at internal level for the case of Italy and provides estimates of network elasticities which are found similar, in magnitude, to those estimated for international migration to the US. The empirical results, robust to different ways of dealing with unobserved heterogeneity, prove that network effects play a crucial role in explaining migration flows also at internal level. In addition, they also help to clarify the role of the other variables that have been found relevant in explaining internal migration flows in Italy during the last decades.