Do natural disasters affect household saving? Evidence from the August 2002 flood in Germany

Michael Berlemann, Erik Haustein, Max Steinhardt () and Jascha Tutt

No 2024/4, Discussion Papers from Free University Berlin, School of Business & Economics

Abstract: Recently, there is a growing interest in understanding how individuals adapt to changing climate conditions and climate-induced extreme weather events, An underexplored question is whether and how climate-related natural hazards affect household saving behavior, For this purpose, we exploit a natural experiment stemming from the European Flood of August 2002, Combining micro data with geo-coded flood maps allows us to analyze the causal impact of flood exposure on household savings within a differences-in-differences setting, We find that flood exposure depresses household saving behavior in the medium run, The most likely explanation is moral hazard induced by massive government support for affected households.

Keywords: Natural disasters; flood; saving behavior; natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 H84 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-eur and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/306363/1/1908134518.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:fubsbe:306363

DOI: 10.17169/refubium-45307

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Free University Berlin, School of Business & Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().