Abstract
This article examines household gains and losses from migration within the Swedish urban hierarchy. The central questions focus on whether increases in disposable income outweigh the associated changes in housing costs, especially with movements up (and down) the urban hierarchy, to (and from) larger and more expensive population-growth regions. The questions are addressed using Swedish Census data for 3.5 million individuals and two fixed-effect panel models are estimated for four consecutive time-periods, 19932002. The results consistently show relatively higher increases in disposable income moving up the urban hierarchy. Taking changes in housing expenditure into account, this pattern is however reversed; the largest gains are made by households moving from larger to smaller labour markets, a significantly smaller share of total domestic migration. The results point to factors beyond short-term nominal income gains as important in explaining the bulk of domestic migration.