This paper compares alternative risk transfer mechanisms (insurance solutions) in three countries, which were affected by the flood event in August 2005, namely Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The comparison focuses on the ability of the institutional solutions to dampen economic shocks caused...

Due to the public good character of protective measures against natural disasters, their allocation is very often in the realm of bureaucratic and expert agencies. I analysed the effect of negative media reports on a bureaucratic agency's output decisions by applying a Vector Autoregression...

The aim of this paper is to determine the drivers of a donor's decision on the composition of aid. We apply a dataset on international post-disaster assistance between 2000 and 2007 that includes information on the channel (bilateral vs. multilateral) and type (cash vs. in-kind) of each aid...

Nine OECD countries presently have national terrorism insurance programs based on some type of public–private risk sharing. While such arrangements have helped provide the necessary insurance capacity in the post-September 11, 2001 era, little is known about the effect of such governmental...

This paper studies how media and democracy influence government action taken before and after a natural disaster. The key elements in this relationship are the media's role as the provider of information to voters about government actions and the quality of democracy that pertains to how...

To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850...

This paper tests some existing theories developed over the past 25 years on corporate demand for insurance. Using a unique dataset of 1,809 large U.S. corporations it provides the first empirical analysis that compares corporate demand for standard property insurance and for catastrophe coverage...

We investigate the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism, i.e., preferential public policies targeted at the political leader’s ethnic group. We construct a panel dataset of 2,022 ethnographic regions from 139 countries with annual observations from 1992 to 2012, and use nighttime...

This paper discusses the impact of expected foreign aid in case of catastrophic events on the level of mitigative activities in aid-receiving countries. The theoretical model shows that the anticipation of foreign aid partly crowds out preventive collective action. The crowding-out effect can...

The paper compares the policy choices regarding risk-transfer against low-probability-high-loss events between elected and appointed public officials. Empirical evidence using data on U.S. municipality-level shows that appointed city managers are more likely to adopt federal risk-transfer...