Catastrophic Natural Disaster and Reinsurance

Supply chain lessons from the catastrophic natural disaster in Japan

On March 11, 2011, an 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck the northeast coast of Japan. Even more devastating was the tsunami that followed the earthquake. Thousands of homes were destroyed, and numerous forms of social infrastructure, such as roads and dams, were destroyed. The death toll exceeded 86,000, more than 13,000 were listed as missing, and 550,000 people had to evacuate the region. The s...

Natural Disaster Prevention and Reduction

Natural disaster risks: An introduction

Hurricane Katrina generated the largest losses of any natural disaster in the history of the United States. The hurricane hit Florida on August 25, 2005 and Louisiana on August 29. Despite having been downgraded from a Category 4 to a Category 3 hurricane, the storm inflicted unprecedented losses. This special issue of the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty deals with the implications of catastrop...

Goal programming-based post-disaster decision making for allocation and scheduling the rescue units in natural disaster with time-window

Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes cause enormous harm during each year. To reduce casualties and economic losses in the response phase, rescue units must be allocated and scheduled efficiently, such that it is a key issues in emergency response. In this paper, a multi-objective mix integer nonlinear programming model (MOMINLP) is proposed to minimize sum of weight...

Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy

Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? Using data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending. These inconsistencies distort the incentives of public officials, leading the govern...