This paper examines the relationship between the location decisions of young adults and those of their parents within the US. I build and estimate a dynamic choice model of the co-location decision of adult children and their parents. The model incorporates both moving costs and the heterogeneous utility of parent-child proximity. By separately identifying each, I am able to conduct a counterfactual analysis in which parents and children make individually optimal migration decisions, while keeping other migration inhibiting factors fixed. Without these family ties there are substantial increases in overall migration rates and a significant reallocation of young adults across labor markets towards more productive locations. The findings suggest that parental bonds are nearly as important in preventing young adult movement as all other moving costs combined. This suggests that these ties are a significant factor limiting the reallocation of labor across the US and provide a natural obstacle to policy attempts to address geographic labor market disparities.

This paper examines how hospital mergers affect local labor markets through their impact on the cost of employer sponsored health insurance. I estimate the effect of a hospital merger occurring within a commuting zone on the wages, employment, hours worked, part-time work, and full-time work of non-health care employees. I find evidence that mergers reduce wages by approximately 1-2% in local commuting zones where they occur. I also find evidence that they reduce average hours worked and that this can be explained in part by substitution from full-time workers to part-time workers, possibly to avoid then costlier benefit provision.