TY - JOUR AU - Feng,Shuaizhang AU - Oppenheimer,Michael AU - Schlenker,Wolfram TI - Climate Change, Crop Yields, and Internal Migration in the United States JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 17734 PY - 2012 Y2 - January 2012 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17734 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17734.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Shuaizhang Feng Department of Economics Shanghai University of Finance and Economics Shanghai China E-Mail: shuaizhang.feng@gmail.com Michael Oppenheimer Department of Geosciences Woodrow Wilson School Princeton University 448 Robertson Hall Princeton, NJ 08544-1013 E-Mail: omichael@princeton.edu Wolfram Schlenker Agricultural and Resource Economics University of California at Berkeley 329 Giannini Hall Berkeley, CA 94720 Tel: 510/643-9676 Fax: 510/643-8911 E-Mail: schlenker@berkeley.edu AB - We investigate the link between agricultural productivity and net migration in the United States using a county-level panel for the most recent period of 1970-2009. In rural counties of the Corn Belt, we find a statistically significant relationship between changes in net outmigration and climate-driven changes in crop yields, with an estimated semi-elasticity of about -0.17, i.e., a 1% decrease in yields leads to a 0.17% net reduction of the population through migration. This effect is primarily driven by young adults. We do not detect a response for senior citizens, nor for the general population in eastern counties outside the Corn Belt. Applying this semi-elasticity to predicted yield changes under the B2 scenario of the Hadley III model, we project that, holding other factors constant, climate change would on average induce 3.7% of the adult population (ages 15-59) to leave rural counties of the Corn Belt in the medium term (2020-2049) compared to the 1960-1989 baseline, with the possibility of a much larger migration response in the long term (2077-2099). Since there is uncertainty about future warming, we also present projections for a range of uniform climate change scenarios in temperature or precipitation. ER -