Individual risk preference may change after experiencing external socio-economic or natural shocks. Theoretical predictions and empirical studies suggest that risk taking may increase or decrease after experiencing shocks. So far the empirical evidence is sparse, especially when it comes to...

In the wake of several high-profile natural disasters, crowding effects between public relief and private investments in disaster preparedness have recently attracted renewed attention. We examine how non-hypothetical self-insurance behavior by households responds to variations in public...

The perception of risks associated with climate change appears to be a key factor for the support of climate policy measures. Using a generalized ordered logit approach and drawing on a unique data set originating from two surveys conducted in 2012 and 2014, each among more than 6,000 German...

Greenhouse gas policies confront the trade-off between the costs of reducing emissions and the benefits of avoided climate change. The risk of uncertain and potentially irreversible catastrophes is an important issue related to the latter, and one that has not yet been well incorporated into...

The possibility of low-probability extreme events has reignited the debate over the optimal intensity and timing of climate policy. In this paper we therefore contribute to the literature by assessing the implications of low-probability extreme events on environmental policy in a continuous-time...

There has been very little research to test whether ambiguity affects individuals' decisions to insure themselves against the catastrophic effects of climate change. This paper attempts to study how individuals respond to the availability of an insurance that would safeguard their interests if a...

How do voters respond to heightened risk? Dominant theories expect accountability issues to surface or distributional conflict to intensify once threats become salient. Unsatisfactorily, these accounts rely on compound treatment effects of exposure not only to risk but also to direct losses or...

The United Nations Sendai (2015) framework aims to reduce disaster risk. We offer a careful definition and computation of the individual and property risk targets. Selecting the largest and better studied class of “natural disasters” over the period 1970-2018, we show that individual risk is...

Most of the literature on the economics of catastrophes assumes that such events cause a reduction in the stream of consumption, as opposed to widespread fatalities. Here we show how to incorporate death in a model of catastrophe avoidance, and how a catastrophic loss of life can be expressed as...