Catastrophic Natural Disasters and Economic Growth
通过合成控制法比较案例，发现只有极端大的自然灾害才在短期和长期对产出有负面影响，但这一结果源于灾后发生的激进政治革命，控制政治变化后灾害本身对经济增长无显著影响。
Abstract We examine the average causal impact of catastrophic natural disasters on economic growth by combining information from comparative case studies. For each country affected by a large disaster, we compute the counterfactual by constructing synthetic controls. We find that only extremely large disasters have a negative effect on output in both the short and the long runs. However, we also show that this results from two events where radical political revolutions followed the disasters. Once we control for these political changes, even extremely large disasters do not display any significant effect on economic growth.