Does the National Flood Insurance Program Drive Migration to Higher Risk Areas?
研究利用联邦应急管理署绘制高风险社区地图的漫长过程，发现国家洪水保险计划使更多人口迁入高风险地区，每增加一个标准差的历史洪水风险，人口额外增长5%。
Despite the large costs of covering flood losses, little is known about whether the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) affects households’ decisions to sort into more flood-prone locations. In this study, we leverage the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s lengthy, plausibly exogenous process of mapping risky communities as a necessary determinant of full entry into the NFIP, thereby granting eligibility to homeowners in these communities for highly subsidized flood insurance. We find that local NFIP availability had an overall positive effect on the population size of communities enrolling into the program and a significantly larger impact on the relatively more flood-prone locations—causing an additional 5% increase in population per one standard deviation increase in historical flood risk. Our findings highlight the potential for publicly subsidized flood insurance to contribute to flood damages by altering incentives to reside in risky areas.