Purpose - There has been a considerable effort over the last decade to increase awareness of the tsunami risk in coastal Washington, USA. However, contemporary research on warning systems spawned by the recent Indian Ocean tsunami tragedy highlights the need for development of an effective tsunami warning system for both residents and transient populations, including visitors and tourists. This study sets out evaluate staff training for emergencies, emergency management exercises (including drills and evacuation), and hazard signage within motels and hotels in Ocean Shores, Washington, USA. Design/methodology/approach - Data were collected from interviews with reception staff and managers at 18 hotels, motels, and other accommodation establishments. Findings - Levels of staff training and preparedness for tsunami and other hazards were found to be generally very low, although examples of "best practice" were found at a select few establishments. Larger hotels already had orientation or general training programmes set up which had the potential to incorporate future tsunami and hazard training, while smaller "owner-operator" businesses did not. Research limitations/implications - Suggestions on how to improve preparedness are discussed, including undertaking training needs analyses and conducting workshops, simulations and employee training to empower both businesses and employees. Originality/value - This case study provides an insight into the challenges faced by emergency managers and the tourism sector in improving the effectiveness of warning systems in areas with high transient populations.

This study aims to explore if learning through policy change is possible after natural disastersoccur. Previous studies are divided concerning if natural disasters in fact lead to learning or policy change taking place. Thomas Birkland and his theory on “event related learning” suggest that it is possible for learning to take place after a ”focusing event” has occurred, which in turn forces policy to change. Through an operationalization of Birkland’s concept of learning, this study seeks to explore how learning can be understood to have occurred, due to and during the 10 years after the earthquake struck Haiti in 2010. The study concludes that there are many different indicators through multiple different sectors that suggest both learning and policy change has taken place on Haiti, due to the earthquake that occurred in 2010, viewed through Birkland’s theory of learning.

I propose a rare disaster model of an economy where the probability and intensity of climatic disasters are proxied by CO2 levels that are determined by inputs of carbons from the firms in the economy. Disasters affect the budgets, the labor allocations and investment decisions of households; the production and investment decisions of firms; and, monetary policy. Six propositions are developed relating carbon dioxide and climatic economic damages to financial variables: the risk-free rate, the price dividend ratio, and the risk premium. The six propositions are tested empirically using a unique data set for the United States over the period from March 1958 to December 2018. The data support the six propositions. For the strongest results, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are negatively related in the long run to the risk-free rate. Carbon dioxide levels are positively related to the risk premium in the long run.

This dissertation studies the effects that government spending has on the well-being of individuals and on community-level economic outcomes. The first chapter examines federally funded disaster relief with the aim of explicitly quantifying the role that the government has in propping up labor markets after large storms that damage and destroy communities. The next two chapters are about welfare. The second chapter uses administrative data from the state of Michigan to study one of the largest, and most sudden, changes to a cash welfare program in the country's history. The aim of this piece is to quantify the holistic impact of losing welfare on the financial well-being of the affected mothers. The final chapter revisits one of the most consequential welfare-to-work experiments of the late 20th century with modern empirical tools to determine whether work-first retraining programs or remedial coursework benefit the marginal welfare participant more in the long-run. Together these essays highlight the role that the federal government plays in the lives of its citizens when they are at their most vulnerable. It is the hope of the author that economists and policymakers can use the conclusions herein when considering and drafting future programs that aim to assist those at the margin of society or those who will suffer the consequences of catastrophic climate disasters.

Background: Bali is a country that is constantly affected by new natural disasters and is located in the area of ​​The Ring of Fire. In Bali, there are four different types of nurses who have different education and different experience. The nurses do not receive any special training in disaster management and do not know what role they should take if a disaster occurs. Aim: The purpose of this study was to explore Balinese nurses' experiences of working in hospitals during natural disasters. Method: A qualitative interview study with semi-structured questions were conducted over the phone with nurses at a large hospital in Bali. The authors interviewed three nurses from one of Bali´s largest hospitals. The interviewed nurses had different levels of education and experience.  Result: The analyse resulted in that three themes were discovered which were about; Lack of education leads to uncertainty in the nurse's work, Functioning roles and routines are crucial to the nurse’s profession and the nurse’s experience of working in hospital after a natural disaster and its consequences.  Discussion: The discussion highlights Balinese nurses concerns about future natural disasters and deficiencies in role distribution and routines at the hospital. During the interviews it became clear that the lack of education was the biggest problem among the nurses. The result was discussed based on Katie Erickson's caritas theory. / Bakgrund: Bali är ett land som ständigt drabbas av nya naturkatastrofer och ligger i området The Ring of Fire. På Bali finns det fyra olika typer av sjuksköterskor som har olika utbildningar och olika mycket erfarenhet. Sjuksköterskorna får ingen speciell utbildning inom katastrofhantering och vet inte vilken roll de ska inta om en katastrof inträffar.  Syfte: Syftet med denna studie var att utforska balinesiska sjuksköterskors upplevelser av att jobba på sjukhus under naturkatastrofer.  Metod: En kvalitativ intervjustudie med semistrukturerade frågor som utfördes över telefon med sjuksköterskor på ett stort sjukhus på Bali. Författarna intervjuade tre sjuksköterskor från ett av Balis största sjukhus. De intervjuade sjuksköterskorna hade olika utbildningsnivåer samt erfarenhet av yrket. Resultat: Utifrån analysen uppdagades tre teman som handlade om; Brist på utbildning, roller och rutiner samt konsekvenser i sjukvården efter en naturkatastrof.  Diskussion: Diskussionen belyser balinesiska sjuksköterskor oro för framtida naturkatastrofer och brister i rollfördelning och rutiner på sjukhuset. Under intervjun framgick det att bristen på utbildning var det största problemet hos sjuksköterskorna. Resultatet kommer diskuteras utifrån Katie Eriksons caritas teori.

Maternal prenatal exposure to hurricanes and tornadoes could contribute to an increased risk for adverse birth outcomes. Little is known about the effects of Hurricane Katrina of August 2005, on pregnancy outcomes in Mississippi. Additionally, little is known about the influence of the April 2011 Alabama tornado disaster on births in that state. The purpose of this study was to bridge this knowledge gap by examining the relationship between maternal prenatal exposure to these storms and adverse infant health outcomes. The theoretical framework guiding this retrospective, cross-sectional study was the life course approach. Data for this investigation included 2,000 records drawn from the Linked Infant Births and Deaths registers. Chi-square and logistic regression analyses were performed. Results indicated hurricane exposure was not a predictor of preterm birth (OR = .723, 95% CI = [.452, 1.16]; p = 1.76) or low birth weight (OR = .608, 95% CI = [.329-1.13]; p = .113). However, an association was observed between tornado exposure and preterm birth (OR = 1.68, 95% CI = [1.19-2.39]; p = < 0.05) and low birthweight (OR = 1.91, 95% CI = [1.27-2.87]; p = < 0.05). Findings suggest pregnant women are vulnerable to natural disaster storms, and are at risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes. The implications for social change include informing preparedness efforts to reduce vulnerability to increased pregnancy risk factors and adverse birth outcomes, consequential to hurricane and tornado disasters.

During natural disasters or crises, users on social media tend to easily believe contents of postings related to the events, and retweet the postings, hoping that the postings will be reached by many other users. Unfortunately, there are malicious users who understand the tendency and post misinformation such as spam and fake messages with expecting wider propagation. To resolve the problem, in this paper we conduct a case study of the 2013 Moore Tornado and Hurricane Sandy. Concretely, we (i) understand behaviors of these malicious users; (ii) analyze properties of spam, fake and legitimate messages; (iii) propose at and hierarchical classification approaches; and (iv) detect both fake and spam messages with even distinguishing between them. Our experimental results show that our proposed approaches identify spam and fake messages with 96.43% accuracy and 0.961 F-measure.

This study focuses on the coping responses of the bereaved immediate family and close friends of persons who died as a result of the volcanic eruption of Mt. St. Helens in southwestern Washington on May 18, 1980. Three major research questions were addressed: Is there a relationship between illness and three life events: presumed death of a close relative or friend, confirmed death of a close relative or friend, and loss of one's permanent of recreational residence? Do self-efficacy and social supports act as intervening variables to buffer the negative effects of stress on one's health when coping with loss? What are the perceived effects of the media on coping with loss following a disaster? Subjects for this study included 155 respondents. Mailed questionnaires and interviews were used to collect data approximately 11 months post-disaster from bereaved, property loss and control subjects. Data were gathered primarily by standardized measures and were analyzed by univariate, multi-variate, correlational, and content-analysis techniques. The first study question results indicate that when compared to controls, the bereaved of confirmed dead were adversely affected by their loss in areas of negative life events, hassles, depression, and somatization; the bereaved of presumed dead reported being adversely affected by negative life events and depression; the permanent-property loss subjects adversely affected by negative life events. The second study question compared the combined bereaved group (n = 69) and the control group (n = 50) to examine the buffering roles of self-efficacy and social support. For the bereaved, stress accounted for 35% of the variance (p < .001) in depression. After statistically controlling for stress, both self-efficacy and social support were significant predictors of depression (p < .05). In contrast, stress accounted for 44% of the variance in depression for the controls, but neither self-efficacy nor social support made additional contributions in the prediction of any of the health outcome variables. Findings from the third study question indicate that the confirmed bereaved reported significantly more (p < .05) negative effects resulting from the media than any of the other study groups. Factors that might account for the findings and clinical interventions were suggested.

"Inscriptions of Poison" is an ethnographic, textual, and aesthetic engagement with possession, pollution, and the temporalities of poison in contemporary Italy’s postindustrial South. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the city of Taranto (Puglia)—one of Europe’s most polluted cities—as well as archival work on Ernesto De Martino’s anthropology of possession rituals, this study of toxicity focuses on the southern Italian region of Puglia, which was the backdrop of two contrasting, yet interwoven histories of postwar modernization during the so-called “economic miracle” of the early 1960s. Puglia was the birthplace of the continent’s largest and most hazardous steel factory and simultaneously, the terrain of De Martino’s Gramscian anthropology of preindustrial folklore and agrarian rituals, yet the region’s role in industrial modernity and the study of ritual have rarely been examined in tandem. Re-reading the region’s intellectual and cultural past through a contemporary ethnography of industrial ruins, this dissertation interrogates the afterlives of possession in the ecological crisis of the present. For centuries, Italy’s South has been represented as “picturesque”—as the occluded of European modernity and the object of exoticization, folklorization, and racism. The environmental devastation and exposure these landscapes endure today cannot be thought outside their longstanding exploitation facilitated by this image as the nation’s “internal other.” Informed by these representations, contemporary environmental discourses amplify an image of a poisoned South, perceived as the source of pollution, rather than its victim. Intervening in the longue durée of this representational history, the dissertation explores a central fragment of Puglia’s cultural history of illness and healing: the possession ritual of tarantismo, traditionally performed by women to expel the poison of a tarantula. This ethnography of Taranto’s environmental catastrophe rethinks tarantismo in the present, as both a continued exposure to illness and the displacement of traditional methods for dealing with environmental risk. Drawing on De Martino’s work on the ritual, including his canonical work "The Land of Remorse" ("La terra del rimorso") (1961), as well as the archive of his fieldwork in Puglia, this study reads his corpus against the grain, finding it a philosophical account of “crisis of presence” that is mobilized as an analytic lens for the region’s current environmental catastrophe. This re-reading follows the trajectories of poison ethnographically, in its most varied material and affective forms: the venom of tarantulas, cloud-like dioxin emissions, contaminated milk, photographs of glittering iron ore dust, and the concealment of a wig. A central task of the work is thus to consider the intermedial relations between text, image, and theory, alongside toxic matter—to incorporate an intellectual history as the discursive part of a “material-discursive” analysis of ecological crisis. These interrelations are performatively engaged in the dissertation’s experimental use of text and image, while informing an understanding of toxicity as a material and metaphorical form inscribed (and remediated) through different media. By examining images and imaginaries of poison in Puglia, this ethnographic study of the aesthetics of toxicity demonstrates that the sensory field of environmental catastrophe affords a privileged terrain of political struggle. Intervening in current debates in ecocriticism and environmental humanities about the role of art and aesthetics in re-imagining human/nonhuman relations in an ecologically unstable world, "Inscriptions of Poison" analyzes the potency of industrial poison, while simultaneously revealing the bodily, psychological, religious, and aesthetic strategies deployed by the people of Taranto to understand, live with, and survive it.

This dissertation contains three essays in financial economics. The focus of the dissertation is to study how retail investors and the financial market react to the arrival or the possibility of disastrous events. In the first chapter, I explore the portfolio reaction to evidence of climate change by looking at how retail investors trade when they locally experience abnormal temperature. I test the hypothesis that retail investors will trade out of high emission stocks and trade into low emission stocks when experiencing abnormally high temperature through a channel of climate belief updating. Using detailed administrative records of retail investors’ positions and trading activities from a large financial institution, I construct measures of trading imbalances at the zip code level for various types of stocks and study the impact from abnormal temperature. I do not find evidence that investors trade out of high emission stocks or trade into low emission stocks when experiencing abnormally high temperature. The estimated effects are neither economically nor statistically significant. Moreover, investors are not dynamically adjusting their portfolios in response to abnormal temperature. The nonresults are robust if I implement the estimations in quarterly or annual frequency. Focusing on only trading activities in the energy sector does not change the results. Analyzing subsamples of investors with different levels of beliefs in climate change also produces nonresults. Although past literature has shown that local extreme temperature can induce changes in beliefs about climate change and related behavior, this paper shows that such belief updating does not translate into response in portfolio choice.In the second chapter, we model the contribution of a vaccine to the rebound in corporate earnings the year following the onset of COVID-19 while accounting for the role of fiscal and monetary measures. A vaccine that reopens the economy leads to a jump in earnings, while temporary fis- cal and monetary support for households and businesses leads to higher short-run earnings growth before a vaccine arrives. We show that our model can be consistently estimated using revisions of value-weighted industry-level consensus earnings forecasts. We first present reduced-form evidence that security analysts account for both effects. Our model estimates then suggest that the reopening effect is as important as the short-run growth effect in explaining the rebound in corpo- rate earnings. The third chapter studies the partisan difference in trading behavior at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Partisanship drives disagreement on the severity and persistence of the COVID-19 shock when it hit the US. Republicans were more optimistic than the Democrats when evaluat- ing the potential damage of COVID-19 to the economy. Using detailed administrative records of retail investors’ positions and trading activities from a large financial institution, I find that the partisan disagreement on COVID-19 is reflected in stock trading behavior: Republicans had more net flow into equity than the Democrats from March to May of 2020. Moreover, the difference is concentrated on industries with high face-to-face interactions and highly levered firms, which are expected to be more severely damaged by COVID-19. The results suggest that disagreement rooted in partisanship can have a real impact on household financial decisions and potentially on the overall financial market.