Volume 4, Issue 2

We review the literature on business activity and disasters, and specifically hurricanes. An overview of the papers in the special issue on Economic Loss and Hurricane Katrina is provided.

Free markets in capital and labor are essential to rapid recovery from natural disaster. Political and rhetorical responses to Hurricane Katrina included denunciation of “price gougers” in the market for gasoline; the arbitrariness associated with anti-price gouging legislation may create uncertainty that reduces the attractiveness of the investment climate.

Hurricane Katrina had a significant destructive effect on the Gulf Coast's petroleum-refining industry. In many cases, refineries sustained considerable damage and had to suspend operations for extended periods of time. Multiple Gulf Coast refineries filed substantial business interruption loss insurance claims following Hurricane Katrina's disruption of their production. This paper presents a methodology to calculate refinery business interruption losses taking into account the effect of Hurricane Katrina on input and output market prices during the period of restoration. Our results indicate that adjusting for Hurricane Katrina's effects on crude oil and petroleum product market prices significantly changes the magnitude of refinery business interruption loss claims.

The oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico has the greatest weather exposure in the world, and is vulnerable to a range of losses that include physical damage, destruction, business interruption, and pollution liability. During the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, a number of offshore facilities, drilling rigs, and pipelines were destroyed and extensively damaged. In total, Hurricanes Ivan, Katrina, and Rita destroyed 122 structures and severely damaged 76 others. Most of the destroyed infrastructures were mature assets that are unlikely to meet the economic thresholds to support redevelopment, and in the majority of cases, the production and revenue from these structures will be "lost" and written off by operators. The purpose of this paper is to examine the destroyed infrastructure from the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons and the likely contribution this collection of assets would have made to future production in the Gulf. We estimate the amount and value of lost production under various model scenarios, present the results of sensitivity analysis, and discuss the limitations of the analysis. We estimate that between 60 and 65 million barrels of oil and 231 to 266 billion cubic feet of gas were permanently lost in the 2004-2005 hurricane seasons at an estimated value ranging between $1.3-4.5 billion, depending on the future price profiles of oil and gas.

This paper examines the effect of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana's state economy. In particular, I use a state coincident index to assess the economic loss from Hurricane Katrina. This alternative approach provides policymakers with a simple and timely measure of the economy for modeling disasters.

We study the valuation impact on 148 insurance stocks caused by 25 of the largest catastrophic events that occurred in recent history. Because of their exceptional severity and the consequent high attention they experience in the media we expect to find significant overreactions of insurance stocks relative to the market, which would be in-line with an availability bias known from the behavioral finance literature. However, we have to realize that insurance stock investors behave not less rational than the market does under these conditions. A clear exception to this are the 9/11 terror attacks. In general we find that insurance stocks adjust gradually to a new valuation level.

We show that GIS based estimates of the economic impact of the 2005 hurricanes provide a more accurate characterization of affected businesses than widely reported estimates constructed from county level data. Our methodology relies on mapping business establishments into damage zones defined by remote sensing information provided by FEMA. Our methodology is based on pre-storm data, so estimates can be made available very quickly to inform the public as well as policy makers. Our GIS-based estimates indicate significantly smaller impacts on business payroll than previous estimates using county level data. Tests using post-storm data support our GIS methodology.

The damage generated by Hurricane Katrina caused significant private as well as social costs. The water and force from the hurricane and subsequent flooding caused immediate property damage, but also potential environmental contamination over time. The decision on the part of property owners affected by Katrina to deal with damaged property must take into account both the private and social costs. This paper explores this decision making process using a real-options model. In particular, we focus on the element of time preference in this decision. We analyze the impact that changes in monetary policy, and ultimately the discount rate, have on the decision to repair or rebuild a property damaged by flooding. According to the theory, rising interest rates would suggest a greater propensity to defer the option to rebuild damaged properties, whereas falling interest rates cause property owners to reach the decision to rebuild properties relatively more quickly.

Hurricane Katrina devastated the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast. The casino industry, especially in Mississippi, suffered staggering losses. We describe the industry’s losses and provide data on the industry before and after Katrina. Following previous research which has indicated that casino development may be a stimulus to a state’s economy, we use a simple OLS model to examine whether rebuilding the Gulf Coast casinos has had an impact on personal income in Louisiana and Mississippi. After accounting for other factors, our results indicate that the casino industry has had a positive impact on post-Katrina personal incomes in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Metal roofs are highly susceptible to hurricane wind damage. Roof damage is a particularly important element in the estimation of economic losses as even minor roof damage can augment the total loss due to entrance of rain and subsequent interior and content loss. Dabral (2007) developed a probabilistic damage model to predict the physical damage in a metal roof due to wind. This study estimates economic losses associated with high-wind, hurricane events that cause roof damage to metal buildings using Hurricane Katrina data and a hurricane simulation data set. A cost benefit study is also performed to establish the cost effectiveness of mitigation.