What can the age composition of a population tell us about the age composition of its out‐migrants?

Preliminary findings show that the age structure of a population can provide valuable information about the age composition of its out‐migrants, and that this relationship can become a key ingredient in the proposed new method for estimating the age profile of out‐migrants when accurate data are not available. The method relies on the Rogers‐Castro model schedule to consistently and accurately represent age profiles of out‐migration, and the results show that variation among these out‐migration schedules can be captured by a typology based on a small set of clusters, or families of schedules. Membership of the clusters is then predicted from simple measures of population composition using discriminant function analysis. The investigation is based on data for US states, CMSAs, MSAs and non‐metropolitan counties, and their outflows of migrants between 1995 and 2000. The measures of population age composition come from official 1995 intercensal age‐specific population estimates for the same geographical units.