Effects of cumulative trauma from multiple natural disasters

The Immediate Effects of Natural Disasters – Trauma and Injury

A natural disaster is defined as an event of nature, which overwhelms local resources and threatens the function and safety of the community. Generally, disasters are the ultimate test of a community’s emergency response capability. A thoughtful and well-organised emergency strategy will be able to quickly adjust and adapt to unforeseen situations and complications. (1) An emergency strategy th...

Natural Disasters

Information Retrieval from Microblogs during Natural Disasters

In this paper, we devise an information retrieval system which can filter and rank tweets according to relevance to the query. We devise methods to understand relationships among entities and action verbs from a small set of manually annotated tweets. We further use these relationships to filter tweets and rank them accordingly. Our results (as published by FIRE Microblog Track) show that we ha...

The Effects of Natural Disasters and Economic Volatility on Fertility

This paper examines whether economic or environmental instability affects fertility. My identification strategy uses regional data to exploit the natural variation within each of the two countries I examine: one European country—Italy—and one Asian country—Japan. I use the variance of the detrended wage to measure economic volatility; the crude birth rate to measure demographic risk; and the nu...

The catastrophic effects of natural disasters on insurance markets

Natural disasters often have catastrophic risks on insurance companies as well as on the insured. Using a very large dataset on homeowners’ insurance coverage by state, by firm, and by year for the 1984 to 2004 period, this paper documents the positive effect on losses and loss ratios of both unexpected catastrophes as well as large events that the authors term “blockbuster catastrophes.” Insur...