Little is known about how aggregate economic shocks are mitigated by social safety nets. I use hurricanes as an exogenous shock to the economics of US counties and show that non-disaster government transfers, such as unemployment insurance and public medical spending, increase substantially in...

This paper assesses the importance of social interactions in determining an individual’s choice to connect to an electrical grid, using an original dataset on a new rural electrification program in Ethiopia. Combining GPS information with random allocation of discount vouchers for connection...

This study measures risk and loss aversion using Prospect Theory and the impact of emotions on those parameters. Our controlled experiment at two universities in Mexico City, using uncompensated students as research subjects, found results similar to those obtained by Tanaka et al. (2010). In...

Since the 1990s flood risk and the effects of flooding episodes have reemerged as an important natural hazard concern in central and northern Europe. These concerns have also been exacerbated as a result of widespread and ever increasing awareness of global climate change, and significant...

This paper presents an empirical investigation of socio-economic resilience to natural disasters of a tropical cyclone-prone coastal community in Bangladesh. It applies the state-and-transition model, a widely used applied ecology model, to (1) assess the current state of socio-economic...

Due to rising incidences of natural calamities, governments are lacking capacity to properly protect households living in areas which are prone to disasters like cyclones and associated storm surges. To protect the property damages of the disaster victims, private storm protection activities...

This study aims to predict the possible negative effects on the Balearic tourism economy of the exploitation of marine oil fields near its coastline. We describe the current business structure of the islands’ tourism industry and then focus on the various kinds of spills that might affect it....

The paper carries out a deep case study of the international aid that Equatorial Guinea receives. This is an extremely interesting country because, not being a failed state, it presents very low indexes in institutional quality. Its oil richness, which began to be exploited by foreign investors...

The present study applies purpose-built dynamic computable general equilibrium models for Ghana and Kenya with a disaggregated country-specific representation of the power sector to simulate the prospective medium-run growth and distributional implications associated with a shift towards a...