Economic damage from natural hazards and internal migration in the United States

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the impact of natural hazards on internal migration in the United States (US). The analysis uses Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax records and analyzes different versions of a gravity model to assess the impact of economic damage caused by natural hazards on migration flows between counties. We find that natural hazards in the origin county are associated to larger outflows, with hurricanes exhibiting the most substantial impact on migration, followed by floodings and severe storms. These results emphasize the need for migration research that distinguishes between various types of hazards. Furthermore, we extend the gravity model to investigate whether people tend to relocate to relatively nearby areas in response to natural hazards, an established phenomenon in existing literature. For floods and severe storms, the analysis demonstrates that migration flows to nearby counties are comparatively larger than to distant counties. These findings may be concerning, as it implies that individuals could still be at a high risk of experiencing future disasters. Additionally, we provide several robustness checks to investigate to what extent our results are driven by extreme events in the dataset.