Data for: Do Remittances Mitigate the Impact of Climate Change on Migration? Evidence from Mexico

This is the dataset used in the research paper "Do Remittances Mitigate the Impact of Climate Change on Migration? Evidence from Mexico". Based on the EMIF survey of Mexico-U.S. migration, this dataset includes information on outmigration from the 32 Mexican federal states to the U.S for the period 2003-2017. In addition, the dataset contains information on climatic variables taken from the CRU climate dataset of the University of East Anglia and the EM-DAT natural disasters database. Finally, the dataset contains state-level information on a number of economic control variables including GDP per capita, the unemployment rate as well as the homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants.

In the paper, we conduct dynamic system-GMM estimations in order to address the potential endogeneity of remittances. Our findings suggest that remittances mitigate the impact of natural disasters on migration. However, we observe negative effects of climatic anomalies on migration, which are not moderated by remittances. Thus, it appears that remittances serve as an informal insurance strategy but may not facilitate long-term adaptation to climate change.