Weather, Climate, and Migration in the United States

Do people move as a result of temperature shocks? Documenting weather as a push factor for migration is crucial for informing policy related to climate change and adaptation. This paper studies the impacts of high-temperature days on out-migration from counties in the US. We find that outmigration responds to long-term variation in temperatures, but not to the short-term temperature variations that are commonly leveraged in the literature. We provide evidence consistent with the idea that the effect of long-term variation in temperature is driven by changes in expectations regarding future conditions, and specifically climate change.