Leaving Home: Cumulative Climate Shocks and Migration in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

We combine a multi-country household panel dataset with high-resolution gridded precipitation data to investigate how cumulative climatic shocks affects the decision to leave the households in five sub-Saharan African countries. We find that while the effect of recent adverse weather shocks is on average modest, the cumulative effect of a persistent exposure to droughts over several years leads to a significant increase in the probability for a household member to leave the household. We speculate that this pattern can be indicative of increased migratory flows due to increase in the frequency of extremes.