Moving to nice weather

The impact of weather anomalies on migration in sub-Saharan Africa

“…This finding supports the existence of environmental non-economic (non-market) pure externalities that exacerbate the incentives to move to another country. Similar evidence has been obtained by Rappaport and Sachs [79] and Rappaport [78] for the case of the US, and by Cheshire and Magrini [18] for Europe. These articles suggest that weather-related migration, in richer regions like the US or Europe, may be due to a larger relative valuation of the environment from rising per capita income.…”

“…Third, one should be able to account for the fact that weather anomalies could potentially affect international migration independently of the economic geography channel. Such a direct impact is consistent with studies emphasizing how weather variability may affect amenities [78] or pure nonmarket costs such as the spread of diseases or a higher probability of death due to flooding or excessive heat waves [93]. Hence, we label this the 'amenity channel'.…”

House price convergence: Evidence from US state and metropolitan area panels

“…According to the model, a shift in labor supply in a city is largely a function of its amenities while labor demand is largely a function of the city's human capital. Past research has demonstrated that climate is a significant and important determinant of labor supply (Rappaport, 2007). Assuming a pleasant climate is a normal good, increasing income over time should be making this amenity increasingly valuable.…”

Agglomeration spillovers and wage and housing cost gradients across the urban hierarchy

“…We use a generalized method of moments (GMM) procedure to produce t-statistics that are robust to general forms of cross-sectional spillovers or spatial autocorrelation (Conley, 1999;Rappaport, 2007). The bandwidth is 200 km, after which we follow convention and assume no correlation in county residuals.…”