Over the last forty years, state income tax breaks targeting the elderly have grown, often justified
by arguments that the elderly move across state lines in response. Using three complementary sources of
elderly migration data and several measures of elderly income tax breaks, we investigate the relationship
between these tax breaks and migration. We employ different empirical methodologies that emphasize
changes over time, including panel regression models spanning four censuses and descriptive differencein-difference/DDD
analyses using a recent policy change. Our results are overwhelming in their failure to
reveal any consistent effect of state income tax breaks on elderly interstate migration.