Job Market Paper
Climate Change and International Migration, with Mauricio Barbosa Alves
Abstract
This paper studies the impact of climate change on international migration. Using census data from Guatemala, we document novel evidence suggesting that areas affected by elevated temperatures exhibit less migration in the following year. The magnitude is larger in rural areas. We postulate that in the short run, years with higher-than-usual temperatures reduce rural productivity, decreasing migration from credit-constrained workers who need to pay migration costs. In this context, climate change’s effects are two-sided. While declining rural productivity makes migration more appealing, it also makes it increasingly difficult to pay the migration cost. We build a dynamic incomplete-markets migration model with credit-constrained workers and migration costs where elevated temperatures affect rural productivity. We estimate the effect of elevated temperatures on crop yields and then estimate the model to match the temperature-migration link we document. We project rural productivity for different climate change scenarios. We show that migration slowly increases for all scenarios as low-income workers need to start saving to migrate. Additionally, we find that transfers providing insurance against elevated temperatures reduce migration under all scenarios. Counterintuitively, although the weather-contingent transfers help pay the migration cost, its insurance effect makes staying more appealing.
Publications
Land market distortions and aggregate agricultural productivity: Evidence from Guatemala, with Manuel A. Hernandez, Miguel Robles, and Danilo R. Trupkin
Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 155, 2022, 102787
Abstract
Farm size and land allocation are important factors in explaining lagging agricultural productivity in developing countries. This paper examines the effect of land market imperfections on land allocation across farmers and aggregate agricultural productivity. We develop a theoretical framework to model the optimal size distribution of farms and assess to what extent market imperfections can explain non-optimal land allocation and output inefficiency. We measure these distortions for the case of Guatemala using agricultural census microdata. We find that due to land market imperfections aggregate output is 19% below its efficient level for both maize and beans and 31% below for coffee, which are three major crops produced nationwide. We also observe that areas with higher distortions show higher land price dispersion and less active rental markets. The degree of land market distortions across areas co-variate to some extent with road accessibility, ethnicity, and education.
Braulio Britos 