How does elderly migration affect urban growth and city-size distribution in the French Riviera?

The main objective of this paper is to understand the effects of regional migration of households over city-size distribution, urban growth and real estate prices. The paper aims to study regional migration of elderly households, mainly those over 50, in France during the last 20 years, by emphasizing on the consequences of migration from households that quit their initial regions in order to settle in the French Riviera where weather is better and climate and natural amenities are higher. Most studies on cities' demographics focus on migration of young workers and households seeking better wages and urban amenities. However, in some cases, such as in Arizona and Florida in the US or in the French Riviera in Europe, urban demographical growth is driven mostly by elderly settlement, not interested in wages differentials but in climate amenities and real-estate prices differentials. Previous work on the way climate affects migration has been delivered from Glaeser and Tobio (2007), Rappaport (2007) and Chesire and Magrini (2009), for US and Europe. However none of these studies has specifically focused on elderly migration. Economic literature draws back to seminal work from Graves (1979) who delivered the first life-cycle empirical analysis of migration with regards to climate. The paper focuses on elderly migration in France. It aims to understand the way this migration flows affect urban growth patterns in the French Mediterranean Coast, from Marseille to Nice. The paper also focuses on the consequences of such migrations on real-estate prices and the eviction of young households' migration, mainly because of the fact that it becomes impossible for them to settle in such high-priced region. The paper uses 1995-2010 data both from the French National Statistic Institute (INSEE) and from the PERVAL Agency where all real-estate sales are registered. From a methodological point of view, it delivers three types of models: rank-size models (Ibragimov and Gabaix, 2011), urban growth models (Schaffar and Dimou, 2011) and real-estate prices' analysis that takes into account spatial autocorrelation effects (Basile and al, 2013).