Historical Climate Variation and Migration

Miriam Manchin, UCL
Elena Nikolova, Includovate
Sultan Orazbayev, Harvard

We study how variability in precipitation and temperature over the period 1500-1750 influenced both today's 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 (with the mean share of migrants in the sample being 7%, and the standard deviation of precipitation 56.22). 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 are stronger 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. Our work has important implications not only for studies linking environmental factors to societal and economic outcomes, but also for migration policy.

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 Presented in Session 200. Land, Climate, Conflict and Mobility