This study quantifies the economic impacts of SARS on the four affected Asian economies and the two most affected Chinese regions using synthetic control methods with macroeconomic and remote-sensing nightlight data. For the four affected economies (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore), we...

We estimate the causal effect of the Indian Ocean tsunami in Sri Lanka on household income and consumption eight years after the event, using a quasi-experimental method. A strong association between area-wide tsunami disaster shock and increases in household income and consumption in the...

On the 22nd of February 2011, much of the residential housing stock in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, was damaged by an unusually destructive earthquake. Almost all of the houses were insured. We ask whether insurance was able to mitigate the damage adequately, or whether the damage from...

We measure the longer-term effect of a major earthquake on the local economy, using night-time light intensity measured from space, and investigate whether insurance claim payments for damaged residential property affected the local recovery process. We focus on the destructive Canterbury...

Aging societies will have to rely increasingly on private savings to finance retirement. The natural savings vehicles, stocks and bonds, are unfortunately lacking key risk-sharing features that are built into public retirement. Innovative government debt management can address this problem. The...

This paper studies the effects of asymmetries in re-election probabilities across parties on public policy and their subsequent propagation to the economy. The struggle between groups that disagree on targeted public spending (e.g., pork) results in governments being endogenously short-sighted:...

In a stochastic economy with overlapping generations, fiscal policy affects the allocation of aggregate risks. The paper shows how to compute the welfare effects of marginal policy changes that shift risk across cohorts, in general and for an application to social security equity investments. I...