Natural disasters have been a major cause of human suffering. Countries with higher income, lower inequality, lower corruption, and more democratic regimes have been found to experience less casualties from disasters. Government repression, however, could also play a role in disaster...

Kahn (2005) found that ethnic heterogeneity reduces the number of deaths caused by natural disasters, a finding that is contrary to theoretical predictions. This paper casts doubt on this finding and uses cross-country data from 1965 to 2008 to conduct a re-estimation. To alleviate omitted...

With climate change accelerating, the frequency of climate disasters is expected to increase in the decades to come. There is ongoing debate as to how different climatic regions will be affected by such an acceleration. In this paper, we describe a model for predicting the frequency of climate...