not robust to including region specific linear time trends (columns 2, 4, and 6). The magnitude of the effect of rainfall two years ago becomes much lower with the linear time trends. For nonIndia migration, the effects seem to be small and negative once I control for linear time trends. The results suggest that rainfall facilitates migration to India but not to other destinations and that, more recent rainfall matters more.

To further ensure that the trends in rainfall are not driving the results, I use a falsification test arising naturally in this setting. Though past rainfall may affect current migration rates, future rainfall should not affect it, as households cannot anticipate future rainfall shocks. A failure of this test would suggest that village specific trends, and not the increase in farm incomes are driving the migration results. Table 7 shows the results of this check. As expected, the coefficients are statistically insignificant with point estimates close to zero. This result is robust to including region specific linear time trends (columns 2, 4, and 6).

Since rainfall measure is essentially exogenous and affects migration only through farm income, I can interpret the rainfall shock as an instrument that shifts household income. Since I do not have income measures for the census data and the NLFS for years 2001 and 2008, I cannot use an instrumental variable estimate directly. However, I do have income measures for three cross-sections of NLSS rounds conducted in 1995/96, 2003/04 and 2010. As described in detail in Appendix B, I find that one standard deviation increase in rainfall increases farming income by Rs. 2,400 and, as seen from results in this section, increases migration to India by 0.008. Scaling the impact of rainfall on migration by the impact of rainfall on income, increase in farm income of Rs. 7,500 (USD 100) increases migration to India by 2.5 percentage points, a large 54 percent increase from its 2010 level. In terms of elasticities, the implied elasticity of migration to India with respect to farm income is 1.1. Similarly, the implied elasticity of India migration with respect to per-capita consumption is 2.5.

# **5.2 Another ‘push’: Conflict**

As predicted by the theoretical framework, conflict increases international migration in general (Table 8). The increase in conflict intensity of one death per thousand population increases migration by 0.8 percentage points. This represents an increase of 11 percent in migration rates if conflict increased from its pre-2001 level to the post-2001 level. Similar calculations suggest an increase of 9 percent in migration to India and 18 percent in migration to non-India destinations. Most of these results, though in the direction predicted by the framework, are estimated with large standard errors and are not significant at conventional levels.

The theoretical frameworks suggests that the migration response to conflict should be higher for the richer households. Consistent with this, I find that, for each type of destination, the migration response from the urban areas are about 6 times higher than the response in rural areas. An effect of 3.1 percentage points means that an increase in conflict from its pre-2001 level to post-2001 level in urban areas increases international migration by a large and significant 40 percent. This is a third of the observed increase in migration between 2001 and 2008. The corresponding increases are 62 percent for migration to India (two-thirds of the total increase) and 24 percent (one-sixth of the total increase) for migration to non-India destinations. These effects are large, and in case of urban migration to India, explain a large share of migration that happened between 2001 and 2008. These results suggests that the urban households respond more strongly to increased violence by migrating abroad.

As discussed earlier, conflict can affect migration in two broad ways. First, conflict causes a direct loss in income, which affects migration decision by affecting the desirability and afford16