Climate-related disaster exposure and regional migration

In contrast to the existing literature focusing on post-disaster regional impacts, we illustrate how the perception of disaster exposure affects regional population flows through household location decisions using a quantitative spatial economics model. More importantly, the quantitative spatial economics model helps identify critical drivers for regional migration that motivate the subsequent empirical analyses. A generalized additive model is applied to US county-level data to capture the nonlinear impact of disaster exposure on migration. The regional migration is not responsive to small and moderate disaster exposures. However, counties subject to severe disaster exposure experience significantly slower net inmigration.