Research

Agglomeration Beyond Productivity: Economic Organization and Resilience to Natural Disasters

Job Market Paper

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 (MSA) level under average agglomeration conditions.

I find substantial heterogeneity in disaster impacts across three dimensions of urban economic structure: 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. Using granular industry specialization profiles, I find that increases in specialization in non-tradable local industries magnify the adverse economic effects of natural disasters.

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Working Papers

Who Bears the Cost of Staying Urban? Skill-Differentiated Migration Responses to Natural Disasters

Abstract

This paper examines how natural disasters shape migration responses of high- and low-skilled workers in the United States. Using within–commuting zone migration data linked with disaster-driven monetary losses, I find that a one percent increase in four-year cumulative disaster damage growth raises out-migration of low-skilled workers from metropolitan areas by 1.44 percentage points, while high-skilled inflows rise by 0.63 points. I also consider a broader measure of risk, defined as the likelihood of being surrounded by more damaged neighborhoods while living in a safer area. Under this measure, low-skilled workers relocate to rural areas over four- to five-year horizons.

Overall, this paper shows that natural disasters exacerbate skill-based spatial sorting by reinforcing high-skilled concentration in urban areas with higher education quality while displacing low-skilled workers from those same locations, thereby restricting access to educational opportunities and accelerating longer-run inequality across skill groups.