ENVIRONMENTAL MIGRATION

People move for many reasons. Some go to look for work or pursue new opportunities, while others go to study or be closer to friends and family. Environmental migration captures the idea that people move in response to or in anticipation of changes in their natural environment. It could be that a natural disaster has resulted in damage to their home or resulted in the loss of work, that changes or differences in environmental quality affect people’s preferences about where to live, or that new regulations, policies, or technologies have caused displacement or created new opportunities, and require workers to relocate.

Our research explores many aspects of environmental migration by using detailed residential and employment histories for almost every legal resident in the United States over the last 20 years. We are working to document new facts about how migration affects exposure to risk and how this has evolved over time, to investigate how the choices and characteristics of environmental migrants differ from non-environmental migrants, to explore how environmental quality affects location decisions and how demand for environmental quality evolves over the life cycle, and to present new evidence on how environmental migration affects economic opportunity.