Shedding Light on the Spatial Diffusion of Disasters

Abstract

Climate research suggests that global warming will lead to more frequent and more extreme natural disasters. Most disasters are local events with effects on local economic activity. Hence, assessing their economic impacts with the help of econometric country-level analysis may lead to biased results. Moreover, correct identification is further complicated by the possibility that local shocks shift production and consumption to neighboring locations. In this paper, annual night-time light emission data covering about 24,000 grid cells for the years 1992-2013 are matched to geocoded information on meteorological and geological events. Spatial econometric panel methods are applied to account for interdependencies between locations. Interpreting variation in light emissions as reflecting changes in economic activity, findings convey evidence for pronounced local average treatment effects and strong spatial spillovers, particularly for weather shocks. Moreover, substantial heterogeneity across income groups and regions is identified.

The impacts of tropical storms on food prices: Evidence from China

“…Food prices increase when nearby regions are hit by tropical storms, even though local production is not directly affected. The geographic spillover range is around 200 km, which is consistent with the spatial spread scale of negative economic impacts from tropical storms using night‐time light data (Felbermayr et al, 2018). These results are not confounded by climate adaptivity and the improvement in the disaster management system over time in China.…”

The Effects of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake on Children's Nutrition and Education

“…3 Other studies have explored the macro-economic impacts of earthquakes (see e.g. Noy, 2009, Felbermayr andGroschl, 2014;Felbermayr et al, 2018;Fabian et al, 2019), or the effects of earthquakes on household welfare (see e.g. Gignoux and Menéndez, 2016), or labour market outcomes and firm performance (see e.g.…”