Department of Economics

This paper explores the relationship between California wildfires and human migration, and whetherit can be reasonably assumed that California counties with a higher frequency and/or severity ofwildfires experience greater out-migration than counties that experience a lower fire risk. Usingcounty-to-county migration data from 2010 to 2018 and wildfire data from 2009 to 2017, I runregressions with two different models: the multiple regression and fixed-effect model. Sourcecounties, i.e. counties where people are migrating from, observed in this study are only in California,but destination counties, i.e. counties where people are migrating to, include all counties in the U.S.In the case where destination counties are out of state, I aggregate counties by state so that I havecounty-to-county flows within California and county-to-state flows for the other 49 states. While itis possible to find literature that explores the effects of extreme climate events on human migration,little research exists on climate-induced migration in California, specifically with respect to wildfires.