Impact of Natural Disasters on Financial Development

Subhani Keerthiratnee and Richard Tol
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Subhani Keerthiratnee: Department of Economics, University of Sussex

Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School

Abstract: We estimate the impact of natural disasters on financial development proxied by private credit. We employ a panel fixed effects estimator as our main estimation tool on a country level panel data set of natural disasters and other economic indicators covering 147 countries for the period from 1979 to 2011. We find that companies and households get deeper into debt after a natural disaster. This effect is stronger in poorer countries whilst the effect is weaker in countries where agriculture is more important. Accordingly, it appears that natural disasters significantly increase contemporaneous private per capita credit. This impact is mitigated by higher per capita income and further dampened by higher agriculture dependency in the economy. Our findings are robust to alternative estimators, specifications, and samples.

Keywords: Natural disasters; economic impact; financial development; private credit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G00 G20 G21 O11 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Impact of Natural Disasters on Financial Development (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sus:susewp:10116

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