ISBN:  Unavailable

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Page count: 36

Hurricanes that make landfall cause significant upheaval, with recovery often requiring substantial resources. Appropriately sizing and allocating those resources requires knowledge, not only of the overall effects of a hurricane, but also of the differential effects across impacted areas. We employ the synthetic control method at the county level on a storm-by-storm basis to analyze both the across- and within-storm dispersion of the labor market effects of hurricanes. We use storm data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Events database, which covers Atlantic Basin storms from 1996 to Hurricane Michael in 2018, and county-month labor market data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS). For each county that was significantly impacted by a hurricane, we define a pool of potential donor counties that consists of non-neighboring counties from within the same state that themselves were not severely impacted by any hurricane. Our outcome of interest is the county-level unemployment rate from LAUS. Our results indicate that pre-storm match quality varies widely both by storm and within storm, indicating that not all hurricane impacted counties have a suitable counter-factual from other counties within the same state. Additionally, we use a case study to highlight significant within-storm heterogeneity across counties in the employment effects of a single hurricane. These findings suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach may be ill-suited to analyzing or responding to the effects of natural disasters.