The Welfare Costs of Superstorm Sandy

Jaison Abel, Jason Bram, Richard Deitz and James Orr

No 20121218, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: As most of the New York metropolitan region begins to get back to normal following the devastation caused by superstorm Sandy, researchers and analysts are trying to assess the total ?economic cost? of the storm. But what, exactly, is meant by economic cost? Typically, those tallying up the economic cost of a disaster think of two types of costs: loss of capital (property damage and destruction) and loss of economic activity (caused by disruptions). But there is another important type of economic loss that often is not estimated or discussed in policymaking decisions: loss of welfare or deterioration in quality of life. Here we focus on how superstorm Sandy (and other such disasters) can have widespread adverse effects on quality of life, and provide some illustrations of how one can try to put an approximate dollar value on this type of cost.

Keywords: natural disasters; Quality of life; Sandy; New York; New Jersey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-12-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2012 ... uperstorm-sandy.html (text/html)

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:fip:fednls:86844

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().