Historical climate risk and international migration

Ein Vortrag von Elena Nikolova (Global Labor Organization und IOS) im Rahmen der Seminarreihe des AB Ökonomie am IOS.

We study how climate risk in the form of variability in precipitation and temperature over the period 1500-1800 influenced both today's international migration stocks and historical bilateral inward migration flows. We exploit two new datasets covering eight European countries which provide data at a very high resolution (with 0.5 degree grids). We find that a one-unit increase in the standard deviation of historical precipitation decreases the share of migrants in a given cell by 0.04 percentage points. In addition, the combination of historical temperature and precipitation variability has a joint negative effect on today's migration stocks. We find that the results only hold in localities that were historically rural and during periods corresponding to the growing season of major crops, suggesting that these long-run relationships are driven by agriculture. In addition, we find that past social networks, attitudes towards migrants, and more open institutions are potential mechanisms driving the impact of past climate risk on today's migration patterns.