Back
Texte intégral
Journal article

Earthquakes, grants and public expenditure : how municipalities respond to natural disasters

  • Masiero, Giuliano Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering, University of Bergamo, Italy - Istituto di economia politica (IdEP), Facoltà di scienze economiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Santarossa, Michael Department of Economics and Management, University of Pavia, Italy
    03.06.2020
Published in:
  • Journal of regional science. - Wiley. - 2020, vol. 60, no. 3, p. 481-516
Natural disasters
Local expenditure
Intergovernmental transfers
Matching grants
Flypaper effect
Economic growth
English We analyze the response of municipalities to the occurrence of natural disasters in terms of spending behavior, use of upper tier transfers and recovery, using balance sheet data of about 8000 Italian municipalities for the period 2000-2015 and the universe of earthquakes events. We find evidence of increasing expenditure for about 12 years after the shocks, with asymmetric responses between earthquake-related and unconditional grants, and heterogeneous flypaper effects across the country. While in Northern municipalities expenditure tends to regress to pre-earthquake levels, Southern municipalities stick to higher expenditure levels when grants drop. This evidence is coupled with a faster recovery of private income and housing prices in Northern municipalities.
Language
  • English
Classification
Economics
License
License undefined
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1319319
Statistics
Document views: 58 File downloads:
  • masiero_JRS_2020.pdf: 141