The authors use an original data set covering more than 400 recent natural disasters to analyze the determinants of international emergency aid. Although humanitarian need is a major determinant of emergency relief payments, the results imply that political and strategic factors play a crucial...

In recent years, natural and man-made disasters have confronted the international community with its most demanding reconstruction challenges since the aftermath of World War II. Managing the inflow of resources and spending those resources well have proven to be two of the main difficulties in...

Based on an IO structure, the ARIO-inventory model simulates the economic consequences and responses to a natural disaster. It represents explicitly production bottlenecks, models a flexibility in production capacity in case of scarcity, and introduces inventories as an additional flexibility in...

As natural disasters hit with increasing frequency, especially in coastal areas, it is imperative to better understand how much natural disasters affect economies and their people. This requires disaggregated measures of natural disasters that can be reliably linked to households, the first...

This paper examines the impacts of natural disasters on schooling investments with special focus on the roles of ex-ante actions and ex-post responses using panel data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Malawi. The importance of ex-ante actions depends on disaster risks and the likelihood of public...

This paper examines the impacts of disasters on dynamic human capital production using panel data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Malawi. The empirical results show that the accumulation of biological human capital prior to disasters helps children maintain investments in the post-disaster...

The debate on whether natural disasters cause significant macroeconomic impacts and indeed hinder development is ongoing. Most analyses along these lines have focused on impacts on gross domestic product. This paper looks beyond this standard national accounting aggregate, and examines whether...

Governments can significantly reduce earthquake mortality by implementing and enforcing quake-proof construction regulation. The authors examine why many governments do not. Contrary to intuition, controlling for the strength and location of actual earthquakes, mortality is lower in countries...

Using data from surveys of enterprises in Sri Lanka after the December 2004 tsunami, the authors undertake the first microeconomic study of the recovery of the private firmsin a developing country following a major natural disaster. Disaster recovery in low-income countries is characterized by...

This paper addresses two vital concerns in the debate on adaptation to climate change. First, how can countries prepare to manage the impact of climate-change induced natural disasters? Second, how can countries ensure that they have the governmental institutions required to manage the...