The effect of natural disasters on human capital in the United States

Isaac M. Opper (), R. Jisung Park and Lucas Husted
Additional contact information
Isaac M. Opper: RAND Corporation
R. Jisung Park: University of Pennsylvania
Lucas Husted: Amazon

Nature Human Behaviour, 2023, vol. 7, issue 9, 1442-1453

Abstract: Abstract Although natural disasters are commonplace, they leave in their wake an enormous amount of damage. The physical damage they cause is immediately apparent, but less obvious is the potential magnitude of disruptions to learning and resulting damage to human capital. Using the universe of Presidential Disaster Declarations in the United States, we show that natural disasters impact a region’s human capital both via reductions in learning for students who remain in school as well as a reduction in the years of schooling completed. These effects appear to be scarring and persistent. Quantifying these losses using the implied reduction of lifetime earnings suggests that natural disasters reduce a region’s human capital by a similar magnitude as the assessed property damage.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01610-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nat:nathum:v:7:y:2023:i:9:d:10.1038_s41562-023-01610-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01610-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().