Health, retirement, and migration from metro counties: evidence from the health and retirement study

Event history analyses and difference-in-proportions tests are used to analyze 1994-2003 data from the Health and Retirement Survey. For young-old metropolitan adults who had never retired, self-rated health (SRH) was unrelated to the odds of becoming a migrant, but for those who had retired, better SRH raised the odds. Neither SRH nor its interwave change was related to the risk of a nonmetro or metro destination. Metro-metro and metro-nonmetro migrants were indistinguishable in their recalled reasons for migration. The implications of the findings for theory and future research are discussed.