The standard way in which disaster damages are measured involves examining separately the number of fatalities, of injuries, of people otherwise affected, and the financial damage that natural disasters cause. Here, we implement a novel way to aggregate these separate measures of disaster impact...

Rational allocation of limited public resources is critical to achieve the stated aims of government programmes. Here, we focus on the regional allocation of public spending for disaster risk reduction in Bangladesh as a case study to identify the rationale that guides public funding...

The standard way in which disaster damages are measured involves examining separately the number of fatalities, of injuries, of people otherwise affected, and the financial damage that natural disasters cause. Here, we propose a novel way to aggregate measures of disaster impact, which aims to...

Why do people save? A strand of the literature has emphasized the role of ‘precautionary’ motives; i.e., private agents save in order to mitigate unexpected future income shocks. An implication is that in countries faced with more macroeconomic volatility and risk, private saving should be...

We quantify the ‘permanent’ socio-economic impacts of the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) earthquake in 1995 by employing a large-scale panel data set of 1,719 wards from Japan over three decades. In order to overcome a fundamental difficulty of identifying the counterfactual, i.e., the Kobe...

We tabulate and measure the burden of disasters on the Pacific Island Countries (PICs) by aggregating and comparing the data found in the two global datasets on disaster impacts. We show that the most commonly used dataset greatly underestimates the burden of disasters for the Pacific islands....

When Economic Consequences of the Peace appeared during December 1919 it was an immediate publishing success, although Keynes’s argument that the book was a serious work of economics met with a controversial response that continues to the present day. While most critics’ focus on the books...

Were Scots to be found concentrated in particular occupations? Did networks, whether through common origin, associational life, religion, employment or marital connections facilitate the careers of Scots in the colonies? Were Scots different from other immigrants, especially the English, on any...

We describe the flows of aid after large catastrophic natural disasters by using the extensive record of bilateral aid flows, by aid sector, available through the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee. For each large donor, we identify the extent of cross-sector re-allocation that is...