Brown Bag Seminar with Miriam Manchin, Politecnico di Milano

Title of the talk

Fields and Foreign Lands: Pre-industrial Climate Risk and International Migration

Abstract

We study how pre-industrial climate risk during 1500-1800 influenced historical bilateral inward migration and present-day international migration stocks in Europe. We exploit datasets with high resolution (0.25 and 0.5 degree grids). We find that one standard deviation increase in historical precipitation decreases the share of today’s migrants in a given location by 0.045 percentage points and also negatively influences historical migration flows. The results only hold in historically rural locations suggesting that these long-run relationships are driven by agriculture. We also find evidence that historical climate risk had a persistent effect on current migration patterns through differences in historical prosperity.

About the speaker

Miriam Manchin is an Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano. She holds a Phd from the Université catholique de Louvain. She worked previously as a researcher at the Tinbergen Institute in Rotterdam, at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, at Centro Studi Luca d'Agliano in Milan, at the Kiel Institute in Kiel, and at the Vienna Institute for International Economics in Vienna. She also worked previously at the European Commission, Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs. Miriam’s current research interests include economic integration, trade agreements, cross-border production chains, business group networks, multinational firms, trade and development, trade and institutions, and migration.

We strongly encourage you to attend this event on-site.
In case you cannot be present in person, please register here to attend online (via Zoom): https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIpcO-qqTIjHN1VKlkh-WgDMDdXFqJx126v