Human Capital Investment After the Storm

Billings, Stephen B.; Gallagher, Emily; Ricketts, Lowell R.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3592609

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 65 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As a robustness check, we use the estimation method proposed byHonoré (1992), which explicitly accounts for the censoring of a dependent variable with fixed effects. The results are nearly identical to those using our basic specification, suggesting that our findings are likely unaffected by treating the discrete variable for our risk-aversion measure as continuous (the results are available upon request) 13. Because this is the only question we can use as panel data, we cannot disentangle risk preference and loss aversion as Callen et al (2014) did, based on Andreoni and Sprenger (2011).…”

supporting

confidence: 56%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Do Risk Preferences Change? Evidence from the Great East Japan Earthquake

Hanaoka

Shigeoka

Watanabe

2018

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

192

139

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We investigate whether individuals' risk preferences change after experiencing a natural disaster, specifically, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Exploiting the panels of nationally representative surveys on risk preferences, we find that men who experienced greater intensity of the earthquake became more risk tolerant a year after the Earthquake. Interestingly, the effects on men's risk preferences are persistent even five years after the Earthquake at almost the same magnitude as those shortly after the Earthquake. Furthermore, these men gamble more, which is consistent with the direction of changes in risk preferences. We find no such pattern for women. (JEL D12, D81, J16, Q54)

show abstract

supporting

confidence: 56%

“…Note that the question we use is the only survey question eliciting risk preference in the JHPS-CPS that is available as panel data. 13 Unfortunately, other important measures, such as time preferences and social preferences, are not available in the panel fashion, and thus, we do not examine them in this study.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Risk Preferences Change? Evidence from the Great East Japan Earthquake

Hanaoka

Shigeoka

Watanabe

2018

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

192

139

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…9 of exposure to cyclones on fetal and early life in the US and find a negative income effect in adulthood for white males. Billings et al (2020) show a decrease in enrolment numbers and in graduation rates and, Sacerdote (2012) finds an initial decrease in test scores of students affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita but a subsequent increase for students moving out of Louisiana to states with better school systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Essays on Applied Microeconomics

Bernabé

2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

My dissertation consists of three chapters in the area of applied microeconomics. The first chapter, written jointly with Tanjim Hossain and Haomiao Yu, investigates how strategic concerns and preferences for honesty affect people’s actions using two games. Two players simultaneously make reimbursement claims for the price of a damaged product, where reimbursements depend on players’ claims but not the actual price. In the game Regular, players’ best responses depend on their beliefs about others’ choices and both making the lowest claim is the unique equilibrium. The game Upward is dominance solvable and both making the highest claim the unique equilibrium. Yet, our experimental results show that players’ choices are significantly affected by the price in both games, with a larger impact in Regular. We need both strategic considerations and preferences for honesty to explain these findings. More players can be categorized as honest in Regular than in Upward and more as strategic in Upward than in Regular. Preferences for honesty lead to better coordination and increased earnings among players in Regular. The second chapter studies the impact of news coverage on women’s job mobility rates at the county level in the United States, exploiting the exogenous variation provided by the MeToo Movement. The average tone of news coverage at the county level is measured using novel data on sexual assault news coverage with natural language processing for categorizing the lexical choice of articles. The results show that the MeToo induced tone change of news coverage has a statistically significant impact on women’s propensity to switch jobs. In particular, increasing the tone change by one standard deviation decreases the job mobility rate of women by 12.8 percent. Additionally, the tone change of sexual assault news coverage does have a statistically significant impact on the labour market mobility of men in the sample with a different magnitude compared to women. There is no evidence that other news events, such as news on property crimes, have an impact on the job-to-job transition rates of women. The results suggest that the impact of sexual assault news coverage on women’s labour market decisions is amplified by the MeToo movement, especially when the information about sexual assaults is conveyed more positively compared to pre-MeToo Movement. The third chapter, written jointly with Boubacar Diop, Martino Pelli and Jeanne Tschopp, studies the long-run impacts of unexpected interruptions in regular schooling. Using storms as an exogenous shock, we examine how compulsory schooling disruptions affect educational attainments and the type of activity performed by individuals in young adulthood. We construct a unique continuous measure of childhood exposure to storms that varies by birth-year cohort and district for young adults in rural and urban India. We find that storms have substantial disruptive impacts on education. In the districts exposed to the most powerful winds, the estimates imply that children are 9% more likely to accumulate an educational delay and 6.5% less likely to obtain higher levels of education (beyond secondary school). In the long run, these delays have an impact on the type of labor market activity that these individuals perform. Using childhood exposure to storms as an instrument, we find that a one-year educational delay leads to a 42.6% drop in the probability of accessing regular salaried jobs. We determine that the impact of storms on education works through a permanent negative income shock.

show abstract

Insuring large stakes: A normative and descriptive analysis of households' flood insurance coverage

Collier

Schwartz

Kunreuther

et al. 2021

J of Risk & Insurance

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Households' insurance coverage against severe losses is central to their financial resilience. Features of the US National Flood Insurance Program offer insights into consumers' coverage over large stakes that are not typically possible in other markets. We examine the coverage limits (the amount of a home's value that is insured) of over 100,000 households. We determine the optimal coverage based on a standard expected utility calibration. This model indicates that consumers should purchase a low limit and retain much of their exposure due to the high premium loads in our sample. Instead, households in the sample typically fully insure their homes, paying premiums well above their contract's expected value. We investigate possible explanations for homeowners' coverage limits

show abstract

Human Capital Investment After the Storm

Cited by 7 publications

References 65 publications

Do Risk Preferences Change? Evidence from the Great East Japan Earthquake

Do Risk Preferences Change? Evidence from the Great East Japan Earthquake

Essays on Applied Microeconomics

Insuring large stakes: A normative and descriptive analysis of households' flood insurance coverage

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About