Natural disasters are a source of economic risks in many countries, especially in smaller and lower-income states, and ex-ante preparedness is needed to manage the risks. The paper discusses sovereign experience with disaster insurance as a key instrument to mitigate the risks; proposes ways to...

This paper provides a welfare analysis of solvency regulation for catastrophe insurance. We consider an economy with risk-averse agents exposed to a common source of risk and an insurer owned by risk-averse shareholders. We show that the optimal insurance contract features full coverage and is...

This paper estimates economic returns to physical capital and inherent ability among Indonesian fishermen using a natural experiment. By exploiting the quasi-random variation in the length of fishing boats generated by an aid program among survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, it is found...

Government support for agricultural risk management tools has grown substantially over the past two decades. While these tools can play a role in strengthening farm-level resilience by helping farmers to cope with the financial impact of adverse events, they also modify farmers’ incentives to...

This paper analyzes panic buying of storable consumer goods, using a novel macroeconomic model of consumers' inventory adjustment featuring search frictions in shopping. Even if consumers are fully rational, an anticipated temporary increase in consumer shopping costs (caused by a disaster...

The paper analyzes the scope for the private market for pandemic insurance and discusses the potential role of the financial market and the government. Building on a premise that pandemics are classified as catastrophic risks by the insurance industry, we start by providing a framework that...

Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of...

Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of...

Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of...

Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of all...