Browsing by Author "Noy, I"

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Open Access
The 1960 Tsunami in Hawaii: Long Term Consequences of a Coastal Disaster
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2012) Lynham, J; Noy, I; Page, J
Research on the economic and human toll of natural disasters focuses on the short-term, often ignoring the important long-term impacts of these catastrophic events. The main reason for the lack of empirical research on the long-term is the inherent and unavoidable difficulty in identifying any long-term impacts and attributing them to the disaster. On the 23rd of May 1960, a devastating tsunami struck the city of Hilo on the island of Hawaii. Remarkably, there was no significant injury or damage elsewhere in the Hawaiian Islands. This tsunami provides a unique natural experiment as the tsunami was unexpected, and the other Hawaiian Islands, which were not hit by the tsunami, provide an ideal control group that enables us to precisely identify the counter-factual. We use a newly developed synthetic control methodology formalized in Abadie et al. (2010) to measure the long-term impacts of the tsunami. We find that while wages did not decline noticeably, population and employment trends shifted. Fifteen years after the event, unemployment was still 32% higher and population was still 9% lower than it would have been had the tsunami not occurred. We also find a corresponding decrease in the number of employers and sugar production in the county.
Open Access
Capital Controls in Brazil: Stemming a Tide with a Signal?
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2012) Jinjarak, Y; Noy, I; Zheng, H
Controls on capital inflows have been experiencing a period akin to a renaissance since the beginning of the global financial crisis in 2008, with several prominent countries choosing to impose controls; e.g., Thailand, Korea, Peru, Indonesia, and Brazil. We focus on the case of Brazil, a country that instituted five changes in its capital account regime in 2008-2011, and ask what the impacts of these policy changes were. Using the Abadie et al. (2010) synthetic control methodology, we construct counterfactuals (i.e., Brazil with no capital account policy change) for each policy change event. We find no evidence that any tightening of controls was effective in reducing the magnitudes of capital inflows, but we observe some modest and short-lived success in preventing further declines in inflows when the capital controls are relaxed as was done in the immediate aftermath of the Lehman bankruptcy in 2008 and in January 2011 by the newly inaugurated government of Dilma Rousseff. We hypothesize that price-based capital controls’ only perceptible effect are to be found in the content of the signal they broadcast regarding the government’s larger intentions and sensibilities. Brazil’s left-of-center government was widely perceived as ambivalent to markets. An imposition of controls was not perceived as ‘news’ and thus had no impact. A willingness to remove controls was perceived, however, as a noteworthy indication that the government was not as hostile to the international financial markets as many expected it to be.
Open Access
Investing in Disaster Risk Reduction: A Global Fund
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2012) Noy, I
I focus on three issues that are, in my view, the most pertinent to addressing the need to deal with catastrophic, low-probability storms and earthquakes (most likely to occur in Asia and/or the Caribbean): (1) the large benefits and benefit/cost ratios from early-warning systems; (2) the feasibility of an international disaster risk reduction intervention fund and its guiding principles, and (3) an evaluation of the Copenhagen Consensus methodology that relate to the Kunreuther and Michel-Kerjan challenge paper.