Simon Reyburn at the RITM Economics Seminar

Simon Reyburn (RITM-Université Paris-Saclay) will present his paper “Climate Change, Migration and Human Capital: Evidence from Indonesia.”

Abstract: I study the long-term effects of climate migration on investment in education, focusing on Indonesia (1993-2014). Combining high-resolution climate data with the IFLS longitudinal household surveys, I implement an Instrumented Difference-in-Differences (IV-DID) framework, exploiting exogenous variations in droughts, wildfires, and floods. I find that climate displacement yields substantial educational gains, significantly increasing the probability of being enrolled in secondary education, compared to non-migrant individuals who did not experience climate shocks. Consistent with the uprootedness hypothesis, these results are driven by a shift in preferences towards portable human capital, rather than spatial sorting into high-potential areas or constrained asset reallocation upon arrival at the destination. Migrants incur higher financial costs for private schooling to overcome supply-side constraints in the public schooling system. Ultimately, these institutional frictions impose a higher financial burden on climate migrants and dampen the returns to an otherwise virtuous adaptation strategy.