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Abstract

This article examines the effects of extreme weather events on internal migration in
Mongolia. Our focus is on dzuds , extremely harsh winters characterized by very cold
temperature, snowfall anomalies, and/or storms causing very high livestock mortality.
We exploit exogenous variation in the intensity of extreme winter events across time
and space to identify their causal impacts on permanent domestic migration. Our
database is a time series of migration and population data at provincial and district
level from official population registries, spanning the 1992-2018 period. Results
obtained with a two-way fixed effects panel estimator show that extreme winter events
cause significant and sizeable permanent out-migration from affected provinces for up
to two years after an event. These effects are confirmed when considering net change
rates in the overall population at the district level. The occurrence of extreme winter
events is also a strong predictor for declines in the local population of pastoralist
households, the socio-economic group most affected by those events. This suggests
that the abandonment of pastoralist livelihoods is an important channel through which
climate affects within-country migration.