ABSTRACT
Environmental determinists predict that people move away from places experiencing frequent weather hazards, yet some of these areas have rapidly growing populations. This analysis examines the relationship between weather events and population change in all U.S. counties that experienced hurricanes and tropical storms between 1980 and 2012. Our database allows for more generalizable conclusions by accounting for heterogeneity in current and past hurricane events and losses and past population trends. We find that hurricanes and tropical storms affect future population growth only in counties with growing, high-density populations, which are only 2 percent of all counties. In those counties, current year hurricane events and related losses suppress future population growth, although cumulative hurricane-related losses actually elevate population growth. Low-density counties and counties with stable or declining populations experience no effect of these weather events. Our analysis provides a methodologically informed explanation for contradictory findings in prior studies.
ABSTRACT
Classic migration theory predicts that individual and household migration decisions are partially responsive to economic pushes from origin communities and pulls from destinations. Recent theorizing argues that this basic relationship is fundamentally influenced by the experiences accumulated within migrant streams, connecting potential migrants with future migrants between origin and destination. Drawing upon a 16-year study of migrant departures and returns from 22 villages in northeastern Thailand, we extend current knowledge about these fundamental relationships before, during, and after Thailand's economic crisis of 1997. We answer the following questions: How are migrant departures from the origin affected by the crisis, how are migrant returns to origin communities affected by the crisis, and how do migrants' accumulated experiences connecting origin and destination moderate these relationships? We examine effects separately for men and women since village and destination economies are sufficiently sex differentiated. We find that migrant selectivity partially explains year effects: that is, earlier periods are more highly selective. Migrant cumulative experiences facilitate migration throughout the time period and modestly influence the migration decisions during economic downturns, but these effects are far more important for women than for men. For return migration, year effects emerge only for the post 1997-98 period and only after controlling for migrant social capital and occupational sector. Origin-based migrant social capital slightly, but significantly, reduces the odds of return migration throughout the period of observation. However, migrant social capital does amplify the likelihood of return migration after the Asian Financial Crisis. Construction workers are the most likely to return to their origin villages after the Asian Financial Crisis, while manufacturing, service, and agricultural workers show little change in behavior.
ABSTRACT
Rural households that rely on natural resources for their livelihoods are expected to face increased vulnerability due to climate variability. A number of empirical papers have assessed the impact of environmental shocks on these households, including demographic research that has investigated the impact of shocks on migration. To date, few studies have explicitly modeled how individual and household characteristics influence a household respondent's subjective perceptions of environmental or other shocks. My paper uses a unique panel dataset from rural Thailand to predict a respondent's probability of attributing a reduction in income to an environmental shock based on household composition and income, as well as on community-level effects. Preliminary results suggest that household composition influences respondents' perceptions of environmental risk, and that policies aimed at vulnerable communities should consider the life courses of the households within a given community.
ABSTRACT
Scholars point to climate change, often in the form of more frequent and severe drought, as a potential driver of migration in the developing world, particularly for places where populations rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. To date, however, there have been few large-scale, longitudinal studies that explore the relationship between climate change and migration. This study significantly extends current scholarship by evaluating distinctive effects of climatic variation and models these effects on men's and women's responsiveness to drought and rainfall. Our study also investigates how land ownership moderates these effects. We find small, but significant, increases in migration above existing migratory levels during periods of prolonged climatic stress, and that these patterns differ both by gender and land tenure.
