Destruction, Disinvestment, and Death: Economic and Human Losses Following Environmental Disaster

Typhoon Haiyan as seen from space, Copyright 2013 JMA/EUMETSAT

Last spring Sol and I finished up the working paper version of our paper "Destruction, Disinvestment, and Death: Economic and Human Losses Following Environmental Disaster." Since the paper is long and fairly technical, we decided it would be worthwhile to do a shorter, more general-audience-appropriate piece for the blog, something that seems especially relevant given Typhoon Haiyan's devastating landfall this past weekend. If you'd like to take a look at the paper itself, you can find a copy of it here on SSRN; a copy of the supplemental appendix can be found here.

The motivation for "Destruction, Disinvestment, and Death" stems from the fact that we actually know surprisingly little about how people fare in the wake of natural disasters.