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 disaster relief and its reward by voters at the municipal level. To analyze how political alignment between state and municipalities may influence the disaster declaration and the probability for citizens to get insurance compensations after a natural disaster, we exploit an original data set on natural disasters and French municipalities between 2008 and 2020. Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) strategy, we find that the political alignment between the local 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 obtained a disaster declaration and therefore insurance compensation, we apply a Heckman model based strategy to avoid selection bias. Although a natural disaster reduces the probability for the incumbents to be reelected, this negative effect is lower when the disaster declaration was 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), France

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

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