This paper studies the spatial implications of structural change. The secular decline in spending on agricultural goods hurts workers in rural locations and increases the return to moving towards non-agricultural labor markets. We combine detailed spatial data for the U.S. between 1880 and 2000 with a novel quantitative theory to analyze this process and to quantify its macroeconomic implications. We show that spatial reallocation across labor markets accounts for almost none of the aggregate decline in agricultural employment. The reason is that population flows, while large in the aggregate, were only weakly correlated with agricultural specialization. Labor mobility nevertheless had important aggregate effects. Without migration income per capita would have been 15% lower. Moreover, spatial welfare inequality would have been substantially higher, especially among lowskilled, agricultural workers, which were particularly exposed to the structural transformation.

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