Accounting for migration in regional occupational employment projections

Occupational employment projections are one of the primary products produced by state labor market information agencies to assist with state and regional job training and worker assistance programs. In theory, the information from occupational employment forecasts should improve both interregional and intertemporal labor market efficiency through better matching between training efforts and job openings. Until recently, the projections methodology was predominantly a demand-requirements approach that failed to incorporate important labor supply effects and interstate/interregional dependencies. Recent research has focused on improving the labor supply specification. This paper reports on one such effort to evaluate the importance of interstate occupational migration and to develop methods to incorporate migration into the existing projections methodology. Initial results indicate that the total number of estimated job openings by occupation have to be revised significantly upwards when migration is taken into account.