Mortality and economic contraction during the 1918-1920 Great Influenza Pandemic provide plausible upper bounds for outcomes under the coronavirus . Data for 48 countries imply flu-related deaths in 1918-1920 of 40 million, 2.1 percent of world population, implying 150 million deaths when applied to current population. Regressions with annual information on flu deaths 1918-1920 and war deaths during WWI imply flu-generated economic declines for GDP and consumption in the typical country of 6 and 8 percent, respectively. There is also some evidence that higher flu death rates decreased realized real returns on stocks and, especially, on short-term government bills.

We build on the Maddison GDP data to assemble international time series from before 1914 on real per capita personal consumer expenditure, C. We also improve the GDP data in many cases. The C variable comes closer than GDP to the consumption concept that enters into usual asset-pricing equations. (A separation of consumer expenditure into durables and non-durables is feasible for only a minority of cases.) We have essentially full annual data on C for 22 countries and GDP for 35 countries, and we plan to complete the long-term time series for a few more countries. For samples that start as early as 1870, we apply a peak-to-trough method for each country to isolate economic crises, defined as cumulative declines in C or GDP by at least 10%. The principal world economic crises ranked by importance are World War II, World War I and the Great Depression, the early 1920s (possibly reflecting the influenza epidemic of 1918-20), and post-World War II events such as the Latin American debt crisis and the Asian financial crisis. We find 87 crises for C and 148 for GDP, implying disaster probabilities around 3.6% per year. The disaster size has a mean of 21-22% and an average duration of 3.5 years. A comparison of C and GDP declines shows roughly coincident timing. The average fractional decline in C exceeds that in GDP during wartime crises but is similar for non-war crises. We simulate a Lucas-tree model with i.i.d. growth shocks and Epstein-Zin-Weil preferences. This simulation accords with the observed average equity premium of around 7% on levered equity, using a "reasonable" coefficient of relative risk aversion of 3.5. This result is robust to a number of perturbations, except for limiting the sample to non-war crises, a selection that eliminates most of the largest declines in C and GDP. We plan a statistical analysis that uses all the time-series data and includes estimation of long-run effects of crises on levels and growth rates of C and GDP. We will also study the bond-bill premium (empirically around 1%) and allow for time-varying disaster probabilities.

and seminar participants at various institutions for helpful comments and conversations. Barro would like to thank the National Science Foundation for financial support. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

We estimate an empirical model of consumption disasters using new data on consumption for 24 countries over more than 100 years, and study its implications for asset prices. The model allows for partial recoveries after disasters that unfold over multiple years. We find that roughly half of the drop in consumption due to disasters is subsequently reversed. Our model generates a sizable equity premium from disaster risk, but one that is substantially smaller than in simpler models. It implies that a large value of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is necessary to explain stock-market crashes at the onset of disasters. (JEL E21, E32, E44, G12, G14)