Fireside intentions and decisions to move

Migration is an adaptation strategy to climate change and the associated extreme climatic events that increase in intensity and frequency. However, frictions and barriers to move induce an intention gap, i.e., a difference between intended and actual residential migrations. One of the original features of our paper is to exploit innovative data, that is, user activity on the real-estate platform SeLoger (mobility intentions) and La Poste mail forwarding contracts (effective moves), to get day-to-day information on reactions induced by a specific extreme event, and to compute a migration intention gap. We evaluate the impact on these three outcomes of a geographically and temporally well-defined extreme event, the unusually destructive forest fires in the Landes (France) in the summer of 2022. We build a control group similar to municipalities affected by these forest fires with a matching method and estimate difference-in-differences models. Our results show that this event both affected positively intentions and negatively real moves. Particularly, the intention gap increases: if households intend to move, they do not necessarily take action.