Since 1968, homeowners’ flood insurance in the United States has been mainly provided through the federally-run National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 raises the possibility of moving coverage to the private sector, assuming the market can price this...

Improvements in hurricane forecasts allowing for more timely evacuations from storm-surge zones are credited with reducing lethality of US landfalling hurricanes. The deadly reach of a hurricane, however, is not limited to storm-surge zones. About 80% of direct US hurricane fatalities since 1970...

Since 1968 homeowners’ flood insurance in the United States has been mainly provided through the federally-run National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which as of December 2012 had 5.55 million NFIP policies-in-force nationwide with a total of $1.28 trillion of insured coverage (Michel-Kerjan...

Implementing strong building codes is touted as a way to reduce natural disaster property damages. However, at the local level not all jurisdictions adopt equally stringent codes nor properly enforce their codes once they have been adopted. We empirically test whether zip code jurisdictions with...

This paper develops a respondent model of Bayesian updating for a double-bound dichotomous choice (DB-DC) contingent valuation methodology. We demonstrate by way of data simulations that current DB-DC identifications of true willingness-to-pay (WTP) may often fail given this respondent Bayesian...