Moving to a Job: The Role of Home Equity, Debt, and Access to Credit

Using individual-level credit reports merged with loan-level data on mortgages, we estimate how mobility relates to home equity and labor market conditions. We control for constant individual-specific traits with fixed effects and find that homeowners with negative home equity move to other metropolitan areas more than other homeowners. We use a dynamic quantitative model of consumption, housing, employment, and mobility to interpret our findings. The utility gain from accepting a higher-paid job in another area is negatively correlated with home equity. The relationship between home equity and mobility in the data is well replicated by the model.