Heading for the Hills? Effects of Community Flood Management on Local Adaptation to Flood Risks

The Community Rating System (CRS) program was implemented by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1990 as an optional program to encourage communities to voluntarily engage in flood mitigation initiatives. This article uses national census tract‐level data from 1980 to 2010 to estimate whether CRS participation and flood risk affect a community's local patterns of population change. We employ an instrumental‐variables strategy to address the potential endogeneity of CRS participation, based on community‐scale demographic factors that predict when a tract's host community joins the CRS. The results find significant effects of the CRS program and flood risk on population change. Taken together, the findings point to greater propensity for community‐scale flood management in areas with more newcomers and programs such as CRS stabilizing population, though not especially in flood‐prone areas. We observe the CRS neither displacing population toward lower‐risk areas nor attracting more people to flood‐prone areas.     

Climate Forecasts and Flood Mitigation

There is growing evidence that flood mitigation is often inefficient because individuals misestimate flood risk. The propensity to misestimate flood risk is expected to rise because climate change ensures the past will be a poor predictor of the future. Greater reliance on downscaled climatological and hydrological forecasts has been suggested to address these information failures. This article combines stochastic dynamic programming with historical data and climate‐driven streamflow projections to determine how changes in flood risk forecasts influence optimal investments in flood mitigation infrastructure. Using upgrades in California's levee system as an example, we show that climate change is causing benefit–cost analysis to become increasingly biased in favor of flood mitigation infrastructure projects. We also show that using downscaled hydroclimate forecasts to achieve more accurate estimates of flood risk can decrease the efficiency of flood mitigation infrastructure investments, if flood risk is currently overestimated. JEL Classification: D81 Q25 Q54     

Flood Fatalities in the United States: The Roles of Socioeconomic Factors and the National Flood Insurance Program

Flooding is the most frequent disaster type among all severe weather events in the United States. Over the 20‐year period from 1996 to 2015, a total of 107,743 floods resulted in 1563 fatalities and over $167 billion in damages. Climate models suggest that the risk of major flooding will increase in the coming years. In this article, we provide new analysis of the life‐saving role of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) using county‐level data for the United States over the years 1996–2015. The integrated view of the physical, social, economic, and political elements of disaster vulnerability guides the empirical analysis. Our analysis indicates that people most affected by floods are those who have weaker economic and social bases; lower education levels and poor housing quality increase flood vulnerability. We also find that local government spending on public safety and welfare significantly reduces overall flood vulnerability. Importantly, our estimates present new evidence that ex ante floodplain management and mitigation efforts required for participation in the NFIP have played a vital role in reducing flood‐related fatalities.     

Capitalization of Flood Insurance and Risk Perceptions in Housing Prices: An Empirical Agent‐Based Model Approach

Federally regulated or insured lenders in the United States are mandated to require flood insurance on properties that are located in areas at high risk of flooding. Despite the existence of this mandatory flood insurance requirement, take‐up rates for flood insurance have been low, and the federal government's exposure to uninsured property losses from flooding remains substantial. Meanwhile, the value of capital at risk varies significantly with flood events and changing risk perceptions, which necessitates mechanisms that stabilize these dynamics. In this article we discuss how a scenario of complete insurance uptake, under various risk attitudes, affects the value of properties in the 100‐year and 500‐year flood zones. Our results indicate that an increase in flood insurance uptake may provide such a mechanism by lowering the value of capital at risk in the flood zone consistently, independent of homeowners' risk attitudes. We apply an empirical adaptive agent‐based model to examine the capitalization of insurance costs, risk premiums, and their interaction in housing prices. Our approach combines widely‐used empirical hedonic analysis with the computational economic framework. We highlight the usefulness of our method in capturing the marginal implicit price of homeowners' preferences that may change over time and separately assess the effect of various factors and policies on property values, illustrating the agent‐based modeling as a valuable complement to traditional hedonic analysis.     

Estimating the Associations between SNAP and Food Insecurity,Obesity, and Food Purchases with Imperfect Administrative Measures of Participation

Administrative data are considered the “gold standard” when measuring program participation, but little evidence exists on their potential problems or implications for econometric estimates. We explore these issues using the FoodAPS, a unique data set containing two different administrative measures of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation and a survey‐based measure. We document substantial ambiguity in the two administrative measures and show that they disagree with each other almost as often as they disagree with self‐reported participation. Estimated participation and misreporting rates can be meaningfully sensitive to choices made to resolve this ambiguity and disagreement. We explore sensitivity in regression estimates of the associations between SNAP and food insecurity, obesity, and the healthy eating index. The signs are unchanged across the three measures, and the estimates are mostly not statistically different from each other. However, there are some meaningful differences in the magnitudes and levels of statistical significance of the estimates.     

Reasonable and Risk‐Based? Replacing NFIP Generally Subsidized Rates with a Means‐Tested Subsidy

The National Flood Insurance Program was created to seek two often conflicting goals: (i) shifting risks from federal taxpayers to those who choose to live in flood plains and (ii) ensuring flood insurance is available to everyone at “reasonable” rates. Efforts to accomplish the second goal currently take the form of subsidies based on location and the date a home was constructed. The resulting revenue from subsidized insurance premiums is not sufficient to cover the true cost of flood insurance, and federal taxpayers have paid the difference: $30 billion to date. Based on a detailed survey of households in the high‐risk flood zones of New York City (NYC), we find that replacing existing premium subsidies with risk‐based prices and a subsidy for low‐income housing‐burdened households could better meet both goals by ensuring low‐income individuals have access to affordable flood insurance while still saving the federal taxpayer up to $183 million per year in NYC alone.     

Does crop insurance reduce pesticide usage? Evidence from China

We test how crop insurance participation affects the intensity of pesticide use in China using data on staple crop production from eight provinces. Our preferred specification instruments farmers' decisions of participation in insurance by village-level intensities of promotional activities and controls for province fixed effects. We find crop insurance participation significantly reduces pesticide use intensity. The reduction effect is greater for smaller plots, older farmers, and farmers who are more risk averse.     

Valuing Mitigation: Real Estate Market Response to Hurricane Loss Reduction Measures

This paper explores valuation of two measures of windstorm mitigation in a Gulf Coast city. Since the home owner is not able to reduce the probability that a hurricane or tropical storm will occur at the structure's location, any voluntary mitigation intended to fortify the home is a form of self-insurance as defined by Ehrlich and Becker (1972). This distinction is important because market insurance and self-insurance are substitutes and thus subject to the standard moral hazard problem. Using a unique Multiple Listing Service data set with detailed information on several hurricane mitigation features, we construct two models to test the influence of mitigation on resale price. The results of the hedonic study indicate that individuals place a positive value on a self-insurance type of mitigation.     

Employment-Based Health Insurance and the Effectiveness of Intrafirm Competition between Insurance Providers

This paper examines the effects of competition between insurers for the patronage of a firm's employees. Since for employment-based health insurance the employee choice of health insurance plans is often limited, the availability of competing plans in the market does not necessarily reflect competition within the firm. We utilize data from the 1987 National Medical Expenditures Survey (NMES) to examine the effect of intra firm competition in the employment-based health insurance market. Using switching regression models, we explore the process that sets premiums and the process that sets the net premium/medical cost margins. We find that greater choice results in higher margins and lower premiums. We also find significantly negative health maintenance organization choice effects on both premiums and margins.     

Early Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Health Care Access,Risky Health Behaviors,and Self-Assessed Health

The goal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage through a combination of mandates, subsidies, marketplaces, and Medicaid expansions, most of which took effect in 2014. We use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to examine the impacts of the ACA on health care access, risky health behaviors, and self-assessed health after two years. We estimate difference-in-difference-in-differences models that exploit variation in treatment intensity from state participation in the Medicaid expansion and pre-ACA uninsured rates. Results suggest that the ACA led to sizeable improvements in access to health care in both Medicaid expansion and nonexpansion states, with the gains being larger in expansion states along some dimensions. However, we do not find clear effects on risky behaviors or self-assessed health.     

Measuring Heterogeneous Price Effects for Home Acquisition Programs in At‐Risk Regions

Any entity offering flood insurance, whether it is private or government‐administered such as the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), faces the challenge of solvency. This is especially true for the NFIP, where homeowner affordability criteria limit the opportunity to charge fully risk‐based premiums. One solution is to remove the highest flood risk properties from the insurer's book of business. Acquisition (buyout) of flood‐prone structures is a potentially permanent solution that eliminates the highest risk properties while providing homeowners with financial assistance to relocate in a less risky location. To encourage participation, homeowners are offered a preflood fair market value of their damaged (or at risk of damage) structures. Although many factors have been shown to affect a homeowner's decision to accept an acquisition offer, very little research has been devoted to the influence of price or monetary incentive offered on homeowners' willingness to participate in acquisition programs. We estimate a pooled probit model and employ a bootstrap methodology to determine the effects of hypothetical home price offers on homeowners' acquisition decisions. We do so while controlling for environmental factors, property characteristics, and homeowner sociodemographic characteristics. Results show that price indeed has a positive effect on likelihood of accepting an acquisition contract. Furthermore, estimated homeowner supply curves differ significantly based on the damage status of the acquisition offer, as well as homeowner and property characteristics.     

洪灾风险及其可保性拓展

洪灾风险事件是小概率大损失的事件，从洪灾风险的特点看，其承保风险很大。按照建立在风险组合理论基础上的传统可保条件，洪灾风险同其他巨灾风险一样不具有可保性。随着承保技术及保险经营管理技术的进步，洪灾风险等巨灾风险具有了一定的可保性。世界上许多国家都视洪灾保险为特殊形式的保险．而给予各种政策支持，使其成为“政策性保险”。本文最后提出了拓展洪灾风险的可保性的途径。     

风险水平、替代性损失融资与企业保险需求——对A股制造业上市公司的经验研究

论文采用Heckman样本选择模型,以2010-2013年间A股制造业上市公司为研究样本,分析企业风险水平和替代性损失融资渠道对制造型企业保险购买可能性和购买数量的影响。研究结果表明,企业风险水平越高,保险购买可能性越大,但与之相联系的高成本制约了企业保险购买数量;企业是否购买保险与现金持有水平存在替代效应,现金持有量充足时企业更倾向于用自有资金进行损失融资,但保险购买数量与之存在依附关系,保费支付受制于现金持有水平;剩余举债能力对企业保险购买具有负面影响,在负债与保险两种损失融资方式之间,企业更倾向于前者。论文利用最新数据构建了企业可保风险水平和替代性损失融资的衡量指标,在微观层面量化研究了我国企业财产保险需求不足问题,并为企业和保险公司提供了相关决策建议。     

Buy now,pay later as liquidity insurance: Evidence from an early experiment in China

This study explores the liquidity insurance role of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL). As a complementary study to Bian et al. (2023), we provide institutional background and mechanism analysis of BNPL's consumption-boosting effects. Since a significant consumption boosting effect exists even for individuals who did not draw on the BNPL credit line, we argue that BNPL provides liquidity insurance by releasing preexisting precautionary liquidity reserves into consumption. We also explore several robustness checks and heterogeneity analyses.     

Pollution mitigation,unemployment rate and wage inequality in the presence of agricultural pollution

This paper established a small open general equilibrium model to investigate the effects of the changes of consumers' unit private mitigation expenditure on the unemployment rate and the urban-rural wage inequality etc.. We found that (1) in the capital specific case, the increase of unit private mitigation expenditure will not only increase the urban unemployment rate but also expend the urban-rural wage inequality; (2) in the capital movable case, the conclusions are exactly opposite to that of the capital specific case. And under certain conditions, the increase of unit private mitigation expenditure may improve national income. According to the parameter calibration and numerical simulation results of the relevant macroeconomic data of China in 2017, we also found that (3) the effects of the changes of unit private mitigation expenditure on the urban unemployment rate is greater than that of the urban-rural wage inequality; (4) the influence degree of the changes of unit private mitigation expenditure on the unemployment rate in the capital movable case is greater than that of the capital specific case, but the influence degree of the change of unit private mitigation expenditure on the urban-rural wage inequality in the capital movable case is smaller than that of the capital specific case.     

Assortative matching and commercial insurance participation: Evidence from the China Household Finance Survey

We investigated three assortative matching forms, positive assortative matching, women marrying up and men marrying up, and their effects on household commercial insurance participation, the number of family members with commercial insurance and household premium expenditures. Men marrying up has a significantly positive effect on the possibility of household commercial insurance participation and the number of family members having commercial insurance. The effect of men marrying up is larger in health insurance than in life insurance and annuity due to the salience of health risks. Finally, men marrying up interacts with the gender and risk attitude of the household financial decision-maker and may jointly affect household commercial insurance participation. Female decision-makers in marriages are more likely to purchase commercial insurance.     

国际医疗保障制度市场参与改革的经验及启示——以美、英、德为例

在医疗保险制度运行中引入市场机制,已经成为国际医疗保障制度改革的重要趋势。由于制度的起点、发展路径以及政府和市场的角色分工的差异,导致市场参与在不同的制度类型中呈现不同特点。为了更深入把握国际医疗保险领域市场参与趋势和特点,本文选择英德美等三国分别作为以上三种模式的代表国家,从市场参与改革的实践过程中,把握改革发展的背景、市场参与形式、成效及发展趋势等,并探讨对我国医疗保险制度运行市场化带来的启迪与意义。     

Nosy Preferences,Benevolence, and Efficiency

We explore the implications of “nosy” preferences—when individuals have rankings over the specific actions of others—using recent theoretical results in the behavioral economics literature. Our model jointly captures preference interdependence over utilities (benevolence) and actions (nosiness). We apply the model to two well‐known environments. The first is a classic social choice problem; the second is a model of relative consumption concerns. For the former we characterize the existence of the impossibility once the social choice problem has been modeled as a behavioral game. For the latter we characterize when the negative externality arising from relative consumption concerns can be overcome without a policy intervention.     

The Effect of SNAP and School Food Programs on Food Security,Diet Quality,and Food Spending: Sensitivity to Program Reporting Error

There is an extensive research literature on the effects of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on food‐related outcomes which has shown somewhat mixed results but generally favorable effects. However, most of the research has used data sets whose information on SNAP participation is gathered from responses on household surveys, and such responses are subject to reporting error. This study uses the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey data set to examine the effect of reporting error on food‐related outcomes, for that data set contains information on SNAP participation gathered from government administrative records. Our analysis shows that the degree of reporting error is small and has little effect on the estimated impact of participation in the SNAP program on food security, diet quality, and food spending. A supplemental analysis of the effect of school food programs likewise shows no difference in using survey or administrative data in the analysis.     

The compulsory public pension and the demand for life insurance: the case of Sweden, 1884–1914

We employ cost‐of‐living surveys, business archives, and firm data to examine the impact of the compulsory pension on the demand for life insurance in Sweden from 1884 to 1914—a period that covers the implementation of the first public compulsory old‐age pension reform and the take‐off of industry life insurance. As predicted on the basis of the contemporary literature on crowding‐out effects, we find that the compulsory pension reduced the demand for life insurance. Our panel‐data analysis of lapse rates on insurance policies shows a significant crowding‐out effect of pension payments. We conclude that the introduction of the general compulsory pension had a crowding‐out effect on households’ holdings of insurance policies.