Gone with the Wind: International Migration

This paper adds to the literature on the determinants of international migration. First, we offer a joint analysis of the driving forces of migration capturing year-to-year variations and long-run effects. Second, we analyze the dynamic response of migration to shocks to its determinants. We start by presenting a theoretical model that allows us to model migration as an augmented gravity equation. We then construct a rich panel data set with 16 destination and 198 origin countries between 1980 and 2014. Most importantly, we find that climate change is a more important driver than income and political freedom together. Our results imply that a large time dimension is key to understand the effects of climate change. We then estimate a panel vectorautoregressive model showing that the dynamic response of migration is very different across shocks to different driving forces. Our findings carry implications for national and international immigration policies