Fig. 1: Changes in relocation patterns after the COVID-19 pandemic started in terms of city population size and parental family availability.

Panel a shows the changes in the probability z to relocate between (binned) city sizes before and during COVID-19 and suggests that movers from large cities were more likely to relocate to small cities after the pandemic started than during the 2019 baseline period (red region in the bottom right corner). Panel b shows a binned scatterplot of our parental family availability proxy v in relation to log-population (blue, left vertical axis) and net in-migration changes (grey, right vertical axis) after COVID-19 shock. The dots represent the mean vertical axis values given the horizontal axis bins (with 50 discrete, equidistant bins along the v-axis in total); error bars represent the 95% CI of the means. The grey line and blue curves are fitted regression lines for the means (linear and order-2 polynomial, respectively) with the shaded regions corresponding to the 95% CI of the regression estimates. The grey vertical axis is \(\log \left[y(\theta =1)/y(\theta =0)\right]\), which measures how much more (or less) of an attractor the cities in each bin became after the pandemic started (larger positive values indicate that on average the cities saw larger inflow per outflow after the pandemic started). Panel c shows a time-series of the average inflow per outflow of cities (log scale) grouped by quintiles of parental family availability v (shaded regions correspond to the 95% CI of the means), suggesting proportionally high increases in net in-migration to cities in the high v-quintiles after the COVID-19 shock in April 2020 compared to the corresponding time in the prior year.