The Pacific Islands face the highest disaster risk, in per capita terms, globally. Examples of catastrophic events in the region include the 2009 tsunami in Samoa, the 2014 floods in the Solomon Islands, and the 2015 cyclone Pam in Vanuatu. Even without these catastrophic events, countries in...

This paper examines whether rare disaster can predict stock returns. We construct an aggregate rare disaster index by imposing the partial least square (PLS) approach on six news-implied rare disaster proxies of Manela and Moreira (2017). Our disaster measure strongly predicts monthly excess...

How much of the historical 7%/year equity premium could have been risk compensation for disasters that just happened not to have occurred? The answer can be found in below-the-money put prices which would have protected against them. A premium beyond 2%/year (for rolling one-month-ahead...

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...

An underlying assumption of this paper is that many 'natural' disasters are the direct outcome of 'deviant' political and economic decisions and actions by states. While focusing on three recent major earthquakes in Turkey, the paper explores the dynamic relationship between state power,...

Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Setting the scene: a guide to this volume -- Reporting, frequency, and correlates of disasters -- Providing compensation to survivors of disasters -- Hurricanes -- Floods and their consequences -- Tornadoes -- Drought and other risks to agriculture --...