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

自然灾害可能导致严重的经济冲击，给人类和经济发展带来后果。此外，人为气候变化可能会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结果，以及这些结果如何受到机构设置或贸易开放、移民和资本流动的影响，可以为未来如何应对气候变化的影响提供重要的见解。经验研究表明，类似的灾害在世界各地具有不同的影响，国家的机构及其在国际市场中的嵌入性对于适应自然灾害非常重要。然而，大多数实证文献都存在一些问题。首先，研究通常使用从保险记录或新闻中提取的数据库中关于自然灾害发生率的信息。这带来了严重的报告和内生性偏差，因为保险渗透率和造成的损害都与发展相关。为了解决这个问题，Felbermayr和Gröschl(2014)提出了一个名为Ifo GAME的数据库，该数据库从主要来源收集地质和气象事件的信息。其次，灾害往往是地方性事件；因此，将灾害映射到不同规模的国家可能会导致测量误差和衰减偏差。这一问题可以通过将最近在网格一级获得的全球数据与Ifo游戏数据库相匹配来解决。该项目旨在开发这样一个扩展的数据库，并利用它来回答位于环境经济学、发展经济学和国际贸易的十字路口的一些研究问题。鉴于基本灾害和气候数据的开创性特征，所获得的结果将极大地支持在可持续发展背景下制定气候行动的循证政策。更准确地说，通过对区域和国家层面自然灾害和灾害后果的实证分析，可以研究贸易开放、金融市场准入、制度特征和发展如何影响经济韧性。研究战略遵循三个步骤：首先，我将调查自然灾害和灾害如何影响国际交易和经济专业化模式。其次，我将使用独特的网格单元级数据，分析地方一级自然灾害造成的福利损失，以及灾害风险和灾害复原力决定因素之间的关系。第三，我将确定贸易开放和地理位置如何影响地方层面自然灾害的宏观经济影响，对中国进行空间分析，以及企业行为如何受到自然灾害的影响，观察中国企业。

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.