Human Migration and Extreme Events: Tracing the Impacts of Environmental and Economic Shocks in the United States

Current models of environment-population interactions are static, large scale, and fail to capture the relative importance of environmental events for human populations. To address these limitations, I analyze migration trends for selected US counties experiencing extreme environmental events and economic shocks. Using a unique data set that covers the 60-year period between 1950 and 2010, I focus on the overall magnitude and the age and race dimensions of migration "signatures" that characterize migration trends.