TY - BOOK AU - Obolensky,Marguerite AU - Tabellini,Marco AU - Taylor,Charles ED - National Bureau of Economic Research. TI - Homeward Bound: How Migrants Seek Out Familiar Climates T2 - NBER working paper series PY - 2024/// CY - Cambridge, Mass. PB - National Bureau of Economic Research KW - Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants • Non-labor Discrimination KW - jelc KW - Geographic Labor Mobility • Immigrant Workers KW - U.S. • Canada: Pre-1913 KW - U.S. • Canada: 1913- KW - Climate • Natural Disasters and Their Management • Global Warming KW - Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes N1 - January 2024; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers N2 - This paper introduces the concept of "climate matching" as a driver of migration and establishes several new results. First, we show that climate strongly predicts the spatial distribution of immigrants in the US, both historically (1880) and more recently (2015), whereby movers select destinations with climates similar to their place of origin. Second, we analyze historical flows of German, Norwegian, and domestic migrants in the US and document that climate sorting also holds within countries. Third, we exploit variation in the long-run change in average US climate from 1900 to 2019 and find that migration increased more between locations whose climate converged. Fourth, we verify that results are not driven by the persistence of ethnic networks or other confounders, and provide evidence for two complementary mechanisms: climate-specific human capital and climate as amenity. Fifth, we back out the value of climate similarity by: i) exploiting the Homestead Act, a historical policy that changed relative land prices; and, ii) examining the relationship between climate mismatch and mortality. Finally, we project how climate change shapes the geography of US population growth by altering migration patterns, both historically and into the 21st century UR - https://www.nber.org/papers/w32035 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w32035 ER -