Climatic Factors as Determinants of International Migration

We examine natural disasters and long-run climatic factors as potential determinants of
international migration, implementing a panel dataset of bilateral migration flows, 1960-
2000. We find no direct impact of long-run climatic factors on international migration across
our entire sample. These results are robust when conditioning on origin country characteristics
and when considering migrants returning home and the potential endogeneity of migrant
networks. Rather we find evidence of indirect effects of environmental factors operating
through wages. We find that epidemics and miscellaneous incidents spur international migration
and strong evidence that natural disasters beget greater flows of migrants to urban
environs.