Climate Risk and Mobility in France

In a world subject to a higher frequency of extreme climatic events, migration appears as one adaptation strategy for households, so that demand for housing will change. While a large literature analyzes cross-country migration mechanisms linked to climatic events in developing countries, or focuses on specific case-study events in both developed or developing countries, the literature remains scarce with respect to the impact of climate risks on household location decisions and internal migration. In this context, the goal of this paper is to determine the relationship between climate shocks and intra-country residential migration, for the case of France. We propose a response function that includes the nature of the climatic shocks combined with local geographical characteristics. Our empirical strategy exploits short-term extreme climatic events, such as floods or large fires, as information shocks that impact households’ beliefs. These shocks, combined with household-level panel data pertaining to housing search behavior, allows us to estimate how extreme climatic events (ECEs) shift household location decisions. In particular, we exploit a large database containing housing search for a specific household before and after a climate event on real estate online platforms in France. Specifically, we first use a database of listings consultations on SeLoger platform containing more than 16 Millions search observations. Second, we use a database of real estate estimations on the Meilleurs Agents platform containing more than 100 000 search observations. We combine these datasets with a dataset of climate-related extreme events and official risk maps. Both of these datasets are spatially disaggregated at the municipality level for the Metropolitan France.