International Market Interactions, Institutions, and the Costs of Natural Disasters (InterCOND)

自然灾害可能造成严重的经济冲击，对人类和经济发展造成后果。此外，人为的气候变化可能增加此类事件的频率和严重性。因此，研究过去的自然灾害如何影响经济成果，以及这些成果如何受到体制设置或贸易开放、移民和资本流动的制约，可以为如何科普未来气候变化的影响提供重要的见解。实证研究表明，类似的灾害在世界各地产生不同的影响，各国的机构及其在国际市场中的嵌入程度在适应自然灾害中发挥重要作用。然而，大多数实证文献都存在一些问题。首先，研究通常使用来自保险记录或新闻数据库的自然灾害发生率信息。由于保险深度和造成的损害都与发展相关，这就造成了严重的报告偏差和内生偏差。为了解决这一问题，Felbermayr和Gröschl（2014年）提出了一个数据库ifo GAME，该数据库从主要来源收集有关地质和气象事件的信息。其次，灾害往往是地方性事件;因此，将灾害映射到大小不一的国家可能会导致测量误差和衰减偏差。这个问题可以通过将最近可获得的全球数据在网格一级与ifo GAME数据库相匹配来解决，本项目旨在开发这样一个扩大的数据库，并利用它来回答处于环境经济学、发展经济学和国际贸易交叉点的一些研究问题。鉴于潜在灾害和气候数据的重要特征，所获得的结果将大大支持在可持续发展背景下采取气候行动的循证决策。具体而言，通过对地区和国家层面的自然灾害和灾害后果进行实证分析，可以研究贸易开放、金融市场准入、制度特征和发展对经济恢复力的影响。研究策略分为三个步骤：首先，研究自然灾害和灾害对国际交易和经济专业化格局的影响。其次，我将分析由于自然灾害在地方一级的福利损失和灾害风险之间的联系和抗灾能力的决定因素使用独特的网格单元级数据。第三，通过对中国的空间分析，确定贸易开放度和地理位置如何影响地方层面的自然灾害对宏观经济的影响，并以中国企业为例，分析自然灾害对企业行为的影响。

Natural hazards can result in severe economic shocks, with consequences on human and economic development. Moreover, anthropogenic climate change could increase the frequency and severity of such events. Thus, studying how past natural disasters shaped economic outcomes and how these had been conditioned by institutional setups or by trade openness, migration, and capital flows, can provide important insights into how to cope with the effects of climate change in the future.Empirical studies suggest that similar hazards have different effects throughout the world and that countries' institutions as well as their embeddedness in international markets are important in adapting to natural disasters. However, most of the empirical literature suffers from a number of problems. First, studies have usually used information on the incidence of natural disasters from databases drawn from insurance records or news. This introduces severe reporting and endogeneity biases, as both insurance penetration and damage caused are correlated with development. To tackle this issue, Felbermayr and Gröschl (2014) have proposed a database, ifo GAME, which collects information on geological and meteorological events from primary sources. Second, disasters are often local events; hence, mapping them to countries of heterogeneous size can result in measurement error and attenuation bias. This problem can be resolved by matching recently available global data at the grid-level to the ifo GAME database.This project aims at developing such an extended database and to exploit it to answer a number of research questions situated at the cross-roads of environmental economics, development economics and international trade. Given the seminal features of the underlying disaster and climate data, the results obtained will significantly support evidence-based policy making for climate action in the context of sustainable development. More precisely, an empirical analysis of the consequences of natural hazards and disasters at the regional- and country-level allows studying how openness to trade, access to financial markets, institutional features, and development affect economic resilience.The research strategy follows three steps: First, I will investigate how natural hazards and disasters affect international transactions and the pattern of economic specialization. Second, I will analyze the welfare losses due to natural disasters at the local level and the nexus between hazard risks and the determinants of disaster resilience using unique grid-cell level data. Third, I will identify how trade openness and geography shape the macroeconomic impact of natural disasters at the local level, conducting a spatial analysis on China, and how firm behavior is affected by natural disasters looking at Chinese firms.