Paper on urban flooding (conditionally) accepted at AEJ:Applied

My paper on urban flooding (with Adriana Kocornik-Mina, Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch) is now (conditionally) accepted for publication at the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. We study the impacts on local economic activity of large scale urban flooding around the world, asking in particular does economic activity relocate away from areas that are at high risk of recurring shocks? Our analysis combines spatially detailed inundation maps and night lights data spanning the globe’s urban areas, which we use to measure local economic activity. We find that low elevation areas are about 3-4 times more likely to be hit by large floods than other areas, and yet they concentrate more economic activity per square kilometer. When cities are hit by large floods, these low elevation areas also sustain damage, but like the rest of the flooded cities they recover rapidly, and economic activity does not move to safer areas. Only in more recently populated urban areas, flooded areas show a larger and more persistent decline in economic activity. The pre-publication version of the paper is available here.