Natural disasters, cities, and economic resilience

Job Market Paper

Agglomeration Beyond Productivity: Economic Organization and Resilience to Natural Disasters

This paper examines how differences in economic structure shape the short-run economic impacts of natural disasters on cities. Using wind strength to proxy disaster intensity and electricity consumption to measure economic activity, I show that natural disasters reduce aggregate economic activity by 3 percent at the metropolitan statistical area level under average agglomeration conditions.

I find substantial heterogeneity across labor market concentration, transportation network centralization, and local trade linkages. Higher industry concentration amplifies losses by more than twofold, whereas centralized road networks and greater internal goods sourcing mitigate them, with the latter reducing losses by nearly half.