LOCAL IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE-INDUCED MIGRATION
Creators: name: Kim, Yong J
Publisher: name: Purdue University Graduate School
Year: 2019
Subjects: Agricultural economics

description: First Essay: We exploit temporally disaggregated data on weather anomalies andtemporary migration to examine the effect of the former on the latter, and the ef-fectiveness of migration as a coping mechanism to maintain consumption in the faceof adverse weather conditions. We construct a continuous measure of migration thatincreases both with the number of people leaving, and with the length of time theystay away. Our results show that, while weather anomalies do trigger temporary mi-gration, they only do so when they occur before or rather early in the growing season.This suggests that households have a limited ability to respond to unexpected shockswhen they occur late in the season. We also find that weather anomalies can affectmigration patterns several months after they take place and discuss possible mecha-nisms. We find that, conditional on these temporal patterns, households lacking onlabor force endowment and social networks are particularly limited in their abilityto use migration as a coping mechanism and remain, consequently, more vulnerableto shocks. Our analysis reveals how temporal aggregation of weather shocks, widelyimplemented in previous studies, can obscure substantial heterogeneity in migrationresponse, as well as their ability to mitigate adverse impacts.<br><br>Second Essay: The study uses the same framework as the first essay. It uses tem-porally disaggregated data on weather anomalies and temporary migration. However,this study expands the first essay by considering agricultural labor use. Our resultsshow that agricultural labor hiring will not increase, although there is an increasein temporary labor migration by abnormal weather driving the previous agriculturalseason. This suggests that households adjust their agriculture plan with temporary labor migration consideration. When a drought happens in the current agriculturalseason, our result shows that irrigation has mediation effects on hired agricultural la-bor. Our analysis reveals how temporally disaggregated analysis yields more detailedresults for market outcomes.<br><br>Third Essay: Sea-level rise induced migration studies usually investigate inter-county or inter-regional migration. However, sea level rise does not affect a countyuniformly. Instead, it affects only specific areas with different socio-economic sta-tus. The objective of this study is to provide information on socio-economic geog-raphy change associated with sea-level rise. We simulate the spatial redistributionof households in the United States coastal areas affected by the expected sea-levelrise. Towards that end, we use a spatial microsimulation. The spatial microsimula-tion proceeds in two steps. In the first step, a synthetic population is generated foreach spatial unit. In the second step, the synthetic population is redistributed as aresponse to sea-level rise. Our results show that, most of the households that migratedue to the sea-level rise, will migrate within the same or to a neighboring census tractareas<br>