Sea-Level Rise Exposure and Household Out-Migration in North Carolina

Rising sea levels are altering the residential risks faced by households along the North Carolina coast. Based at the Hino Lab, this project examines how exposure to coastal inundation risk shapes residential mobility.

We link spatially resolved sea-level rise and flood exposure estimates from NOAA and FEMA to a longitudinal consumer credit panel covering over 500,000 individual residential histories in North Carolina from 1990 to 2020. The credit panel provides the residential mobility signal: address changes over time at scale, without the attrition problems of traditional survey-based panels. We are applying IPTW, g-computation, and TMLE to this linked dataset to estimate how graded coastal inundation risk shapes households’ decisions to relocate, and whether lower-income and less-mobile households are least able to act on that risk. This work is a collaboration with Garcia, Hino, Kwass-Mason, and Yan at the Hino Lab.