Are natural disasters political events for municipalities?

Carla Morvan
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Carla Morvan: CEE-M - Centre d'Economie de l'Environnement - Montpellier - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement - Institut Agro Montpellier - Institut Agro - Institut national d'enseignement supérieur pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement - UM - Université de Montpellier

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Abstract: This paper provides new evidence on the role of political alignment in natural disasterrelief and its reward by voters at the municipal level. To analyze how political alignmentbetween state and municipalities may influence the disaster declaration and the probabilityfor citizens to get insurance compensations after a natural disaster, we exploit an originaldata set on natural disasters and French municipalities between 2008 and 2020. Using adifference-in-differences (DiD) strategy, we find that the political alignment between thelocal incumbent and the state significantly increases the probability to obtain a natural dis-aster declaration from state. To check whether citizens reward the incumbents who obtaineda disaster declaration and therefore insurance compensation, we apply a Heckman modelbased strategy to avoid selection bias. Although a natural disaster reduces the probabilityfor the incumbents to be reelected, this negative effect is lower when the disaster declarationwas decided by state.

Keywords: Political alignment; natural disasters; quasi-natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-04-03
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Published in European Public Choice Society, Apr 2025, Riga, Latvia

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05124599

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