Research
Here’s some of my current research on flood policy instruments and hurricane impacts. Please contact me for any additional informaton about this work.
Levees: Infrastructure and Insurance as Adaptation to Flood Risk (joint with Anna Ziff)
Abstract: This paper considers the interaction of two key flood policy instruments commonly used in the US, levee infrastructure and flood insurance, and measures how much flood insurance take-up changes in response to levee provision. Levees are critical infrastructure that reduce expected flood damage in a protected area. When a levee is constructed, and later accredited by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), it alters inherent flood risk, flood insurance prices, and mandatory insurance purchase requirements. Using a novel panel dataset drawing from the National Levee Database, manually collected levee accreditation documentation, and FEMA flood insurance data, we leverage variation in levee construction and accreditation timing within a difference-in-differences design. Construction timing allows us to examine insurance take-up as a result of decreased flood risk, while take-up responses to accreditation reflect changes in insurance prices and mandatory purchase requirements. Our paper has three main findings: first, we find that on net, households substitute flood insurance for levee provision, decreasing insurance take-up by 20 percent. When we further decompose this effect, we find that households initially respond to levee construction with a large decrease in demand, which is then mitigated by price reductions following levee accreditation. Third, we estimate that decreases in flood insurance take-up due to levee provision crowds out aggregate household insurance spending by $183,325 per levee-mile.
Natural Disasters and Firm Behavior in the United States
Hurricanes cause tremendous economic damage to the United States. Although economists have studied macro-level indicators of economic progress following these devastating disasters, there is very little evidence of establishment-level responses to hurricanes, and heterogeneity in outcomes depending on establishment characteristics. This paper combines detailed spatial data on hurricane trajectories with county-level characteristics on establishment entry and exit to provide the first empirical micro-level estimates of establishment behavior following a natural disaster. I plan to perform a heterogeneity analysis to determine how entry and exit varies depending on establishment characteristics. My initial results indicate that establishments actually increase following a hurricane event, and this increase persists for many years following the disaster. I find no evidence of firm size heterogeneity in post-hurricane establishment counts.