The Economic and Political Impacts of Displacement from Hurricane Maria

Abstract:
In September 2017 Hurricanes Irma and Maria struck Puerto Rico in rapid succession, killing thousands, devastating the island's infrastructure, and leaving many of its homes uninhabitable. Faced with a long and uncertain recovery, many Puerto Ricans instead opted to move to the US mainland, where as US citizens they enjoy full rights to work and vote. Using various data sources, including data from FEMA disaster relief applications, we show that rather than spreading uniformly throughout the contiguous states these evacuees tended to cluster heavily in relatively few areas. This provides a unique opportunity to measure with some precision the impact of a sudden increase in labour supply on the local labour market outcomes of natives. We aggregate the QCEW data by commuting zone to measure the impact of these migrant inflows on outcomes in Orlando, which received by far the largest number Puerto Rican evacuees in the months following Hurricane Maria