Conference Agenda

This paper proposes a novel empirical approach to estimating the economic cost of climate change by examining how migrants trade off a change in their long-run climate against real income. Migration events often involve a shift in climate comparable in magnitude to warming projections over the 21st century. Assuming that migrants know how these climatic differences affect their economic and social wellbeing, we combine U.S. Census data on individual migration decisions, labor market outcomes, housing costs, and demographic characteristics into a discrete choice framework to assess how potential earnings and climate jointly influence relocation decisions within the United States. We use these estimates to infer a willingness-to-accept value for climate change, demonstrating robustness to myriad modeling approaches. We then combine this valuation estimate with a global simple climate model and probabilistic future projections of emissions and socioeconomic change to convert this value into a social cost of carbon (SCC) for the U.S., contributing a new method for SCC estimation to a growing body of research aiming to quantify the costs of a warming world.