We analyse internal migration triggered by natural disasters in Bangladesh. We conducted a survey in nine coastal districts and two major cities in Bangladesh to investigate whether floods and cyclones, which can be considered as transient shocks, affect interregional migration differently compared to riverbank erosion that causes loss of lands and thus generates shocks that are permanent in nature. Our findings suggest that transient shocks induce households to move to nearby cities while permanent shocks push people to big cities with more opportunities. Comparing income and expenditure of migrants and non-migrant households, we find that the former group is better-off relative to their counterpart, indicating that welfare can be improved by facilitating migration. Rising exposure to climate change induced natural disasters around the world imply that our findings will be increasingly relevant for designing policies to address vulnerability, particularly for disaster prone countries with weak social safety nets.

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Flood and wind are the major risk factors that can influence people’s evacuation behavior during a hurricane event. This paper explores the differences in hazard-specific risk perceptions (flood risk vs. wind risk) in respondent’s evacuation decision. Both risk perception and evacuation behaviors reflect complex behavioral dynamics which can be shaped by a host of factors. We analyze more than eight hundred randomly selected household responses from the states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi following Hurricane Ivan. The survey data was geocoded which allowed us to build a geo-spatial database that was integrated to the household survey data. The geo-spatial variables such as distance from shoreline, distance from evacuation route, distance from hurricane Ivan track, wind and rain exposure during hurricane Ivan, elevation of house from mean sea level are location specific variables that help us to gain a better understanding of flood risk perception (FRP) and wind risk perception (WRP) and their role in explaining evacuation behavior. Based on two sets of Bivariate Probit (BP) models, the empirical analyses suggest that FRP positively affects evacuation decision while the WRP negatively affects evacuation decision.JEL-Classification: Q54

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