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

Climate-driven displacement is a growing public health challenge, but causal evidence on who relocates in response to environmental exposure, and who cannot, remains thin. Based at the Hino-Sebastian Flood Lab, this project addresses that gap for coastal North Carolina.

We link spatially resolved sea-level rise and flood exposure estimates from NOAA and FEMA to a longitudinal TransUnion 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. Applying IPTW, G-computation, and TMLE to this linked dataset, we estimate how graded coastal inundation risk shapes households’ decisions to relocate, distinguishing voluntary moves from constrained staying, which falls disproportionately on lower-income and less-mobile populations. This work is a collaboration with Garcia, Hino, Kwass-Mason, and Yan at the Hino-Sebastian Flood Lab.