| In the United States, low-income people are not evenly distributed across the rural-urban landscape. Does this phenomenon partly reflect that people who "choose" to live in rural areas have unmeasured attributes related to poverty? To address this question, I use data from nine waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to track economic well-being and rural/urban residential choice among a sample of 6,461 householders. A series of multivariate regression models are estimated in which the dependent variable is a householder's income to need and explanatory variables are individual attributes and place-level factors, including whether the county of residence is nonmetropolitan (nonmetro). First I estimate an ordinary least squares (OLS) model which... |
