I focus on three issues that are, in my view, the most pertinent to addressing the need to deal with catastrophic, low-probability storms and earthquakes (most likely to occur in Asia and/or the Caribbean): (1) the large benefits and benefit/cost ratios from early-warning systems; (2) the...

This paper sheds light on the linkages between banking crises and sudden stops and discusses the effectiveness of short-run lending in their prevention. It develops an overlapping generations framework and incorporates the possibilities of bank runs and moral hazard of financial intermediaries....

The effects of outward FDI on home country’s growth remain an open question. The growth of outward FDI has renewed this attention. By allowing for endogenous decisions of firms on both whether to conduct FDI and whether to flow capital returns back to the home country, we have found several...

Along the studies suggesting IMF to promote private capital flows, this paper sheds light on the links of banking crisis and sudden stops and provides suggestions which are flexible and more specific for countries in various situations of sudden stops. In this overlapping generation framework in...

Research on the economic and human toll of natural disasters focuses on the short-term, often ignoring the important long-term impacts of these catastrophic events. The main reason for the lack of empirical research on the long-term is the inherent and unavoidable difficulty in identifying any...

We examine the short-run impact of the Canterbury earthquakes (4/9/2010, and 22/2/2011) on the New Zealand economy using VAR macro-models. Maybe surprisingly, we find little evidence of a pronounced impact on the aggregate economy. Our results suggest that the earthquakes reduced CPI inflation...

Medical marijuana laws generate significant policy debates regarding drug policy. In particular, if marijuana is a complement or a gateway drug to hard drugs, these laws would increase not only the usage of marijuana but hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin. In this paper, I empirically study...

We conduct a meta-regression analysis of the existing literature on the impacts of disasters on households, focusing on the poor and on poverty measures. We find much heterogeneity in these impacts, but several general patterns, often observed in individual case-studies, emerge. Incomes are...

I employ a typology of disaster impacts that distinguishes between direct and indirect damages. Direct damages are the damage to fixed assets and capital (including inventories), damages to raw materials and extractable natural resources, and of course mortality and morbidity that are a direct...

Simple and intuitive non-parametric methods are provided for estimating variance change points for time series data. Only slight alterations to existing open-source computer code applying CUSUM methods for estimating breakpoints are required to apply our proposed techniques. Our approach,...