Migration Flows: Population Scaling and Heavy Tails

Abstract

We show how migration between counties in different cities can explain both the population scaling of mean intercity flows and heavy-tailed intercity net-flow distributions. Density-dependent departure and arrival activities determine how mean flows scale with the populations of the origin and destination cities. We assume Gaussian county-pair net flows with standard deviations proportional to their mean directional flows. At a fixed correlation between county-pair net flows, their sum is Gaussian. Averaging this conditional Gaussian density over the correlation distribution can produce an intermediate power law with a Gaussian cutoff. We also present a stochastic model that generates the variance distribution used in this mixture.