Life-Course Event History of Migration

Life-course event-history analysis treats migration not as an isolated event but as one thread in a web of parallel biographies — partnership, childbearing, education, and employment — that unfold together and influence one another over a lifetime. Building on Daniel Courgeau's program of analyzing migration alongside family and career and on Kulu and Milewski's synthesis of family change and migration, the approach models several multi-state, multi-episode processes at once and asks how transitions in one career trigger or delay moves in another. Methodologically it generalizes the single-event hazard model in three ways: it allows repeated episodes (people move more than once and pass through many states), it lets the current states of parallel processes enter as time-varying causes of migration, and, in its most demanding form, it estimates the processes jointly as a simultaneous-equations system with correlated unobserved heterogeneity to separate genuine causal interdependence from shared selection. The payoff is a model of migration that respects its embeddedness in the rest of the life course.