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Working Papers

Do Natural Disasters Affect Household Saving?

Michael Berlemann, Erik Haustein, Max Friedrich Steinhardt, Jascha Tutt (2024),
2024 4, School of Business & Economics, Berlin.

Recently, there is a growing interest in understanding how individuals adapt to changing climate conditions and climate-induced extreme weather events. An underexplored question is whether and how climate-related natural hazards affect household saving behavior. For this purpose, we exploit a natural experiment stemming from the European Flood of August 2002. Combining micro data with geo-coded flood maps allows us to analyze the causal impact of flood exposure on household savings within a differences-in-differences setting. We find that flood exposure depresses household saving behavior in the medium run. The most likely explanation is moral hazard induced by massive government support for affected households.

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External authors

Max Friedrich Steinhardt

Jascha Tutt