京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(地球環境学) / 甲第20744号 / 地環博第167号 / 新制||地環||33(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院地球環境学舎地球環境学専攻 / (主査)准教授 吉野 章, 教授 岡﨑 健二, 准教授 西前 出 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Global Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

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Eine geschlossene ökonomische Theorie der Naturkatastrophen existiert bislang nicht. Arbeiten, die sich dieses Themas aus volkswirtschaftlicher Sicht annehmen und dabei vor allem die langfristig wirksam werdenden ökonomischen Prozesse betrachten, besitzen folglich Pioniercharakter. Denn die entsprechend erweiterte Fragestellung geht über die der Versicherung hinaus: Wie sind die Folgen für eine Wirtschaft bzw. ein Wirtschaftssystem einzuordnen? Je nach regionaler, sektoraler und zeitlicher Abgrenzung - letzteres im Sinne der Einwirkzeit nach Auftreten der Katastrophe - führt zu unterschiedlichen Sichtweisen des Schadens und damit auch der Möglichkeiten, derartige Schäden aufzufangen und eine Volkswirtschaft selbsttragend und nachhaltig zu stabilisieren. Zu den wichtigen Leistungen des Verfassers zählen die definitorische Aufbereitung, eine deskriptive Analyse von Naturkatastrophen und eine Reihe von Fallstudien, die die Schadensklassifikation vorbereiten, in einem zweiten Schritt die Herausarbeitung stilisierter Fakten für Naturkatastrophen auf theoretischer Grundlage, die dann in einem schätzbaren Wachstumsmodell münden. Wichtig ist hierbei insbesondere die Abbildung der je nach Schadensart und nach zivilisatorischen Stand sehr unterschiedlich wirkenden Vernetzung: Wird durch einen Wirbelsturm ein Finanzzentrum bedroht oder führt ein Vulkanausbruch zum Verlust der Ernährungsgrundlage? Die ökonomische Analyse der unterschiedlichen Pfade des Wiederaufbaus nach einer Katastrophe und das Herausarbeiten entsprechender Muster ist als besonderer Beitrag zu betrachten, weil sie einen neuen Blick auf die Katastrophenfolgenabschätzung bieten. Aufgabe dieser Arbeit ist es, das tatsächliche Ausmaß der genannten Auswirkungen qualitativ und vor allem quantitativ zu erfassen. Von vorrangigem Interesse sind dabei zum einen die Folgen der Katastrophenauswirkungen für das wirtschaftliche Wachstum des betroffenen Landes, zum anderen die Einflußfaktoren für den Umfang dieser Katastrophenauswirkungen. Aufgrund des im weiteren Verlauf deutlich werdenden Mangels an einschlägiger empirischer Literatur wählt diese Arbeit einen umfassenden Ansatz zur Beantwortung der Problemstellung. Den Überlegungen liegt eine dreistufige Struktur zugrunde, wobei die erste Stufe innerhalb einer volkswirtschaftlichen Arbeit nicht zu lösen ist. Es handelt sich dabei um die Bestimmung der Eintrittswahrscheinlichkeit bzw. des Eintrittszeitpunktes einer Naturkatastrophe. Dieser ist die Basis für die zweite Stufe: das Ausmaß der Katastrophenfolgen. Sind diese bekannt, können in der dritten Stufe die Auswirkungen auf die Wirtschaft bestimmt werden.

My dissertation consists of two essays that explore important aspects of empirical corporate finance, specifically the importance of political factors and public attention that come in to play in the granting of post-disaster loans. The first paper, “Natural disasters, public attention, and disaster lending”, examines how public attention (as measured by a Google search metric that I constructed) to local natural disasters affects firms’ access to debt. I hypothesize that the lending behavior of creditors in the aftermath of a natural disaster would be strongly influenced by two factors: (1) direct governmental pressure on local and foreign banks, and (2) indirect pressure from local community sentiment. National governments are influenced by public attention around the local natural disaster. They also use the degree of public attention to pressure private banks and state banks to make disaster loans to firms affected by the natural disasters. I posit that the influence and effectiveness of the governmental pressure would be a function of the degree to which the embedding economy has state-owned banks and nationalized banks. Governmental pressure would be limited in its impact in economies that are private (as in the United States or the United Kingdom). The empirical investigation in my first paper will make use of two novel multidimensional cognitive indices using machine learning. The first index (natural disaster intensity index) captures the intensity of the natural disaster. The second index measures the degree of public attention to natural disasters in the local community and is constructed by using Google Trends search data (web searches, image searches, online news searches, and YouTube video searches). Using firm-level and natural disaster data from 30 countries, I document that firms are able to borrow more when there is a heightened public attention to the natural disaster. I also find that different types of media searches (i.e., web searches, online news searches, image searches and YouTube video searches) have differential impact on public attention, and hence, on incremental borrowing by affected firms. I examine the change in debt likelihood as a function of the proportion of image searches (i.e., relative importance of image searches divided by the total of all four types of searches). Here, I observe a nonlinear relationship between the increase in debt likelihood and the proportion of image searches. The increase in debt likelihood has an “inverted U-shaped” relationship with the degree of image searches. I also find similar relationship between the increase in debt likelihood and the proportion of online news searches and web searches. The response of debt likelihood to public attention is higher in countries with a higher historical vulnerability to natural disasters. The response of debt likelihood to public attention is higher following earthquakes and wildfires. I also document an increase in debt likelihood following disasters to which there is heightened public attention in economies with a smaller fraction of state-owned banks. This relationship also obtains in economies with a smaller fraction of foreign banks in the banking sector. This paper addresses important issues of access to debt financing for firms affected by natural disasters. I construct various indices of the degree of community attention and use them as proxies for the importance of political factors and governmental pressure that can influence the change in leverage following the natural disaster. I use novel metrics of public attention based on big data and media search using machine learning for firms around the world. Firms affected by the natural disaster are often at the mercy of access to finance from the relief efforts of the local government and the local banking sector. The availability of disaster loans may have dramatic and long-run effects on the ability of the community to cope with the disaster. Lack of access to capital in such situations (including Covid-19) is an important societal issue, affecting corporate bankruptcies and unemployment. The issue is how the private sector will react to natural disasters with or without government support. This paper provides a novel and behavioral explanation for disaster financing and examines several predictions using novel data and novel metrics to measure the intensity of community sentiment and attention. The second paper, “Polls, Politics and SBA Disaster Loans”, examines the effect of certain important political factors (e.g., the current national popularity of the incumbent U.S. President) on the federal disaster relief effort through the SBA (Small Business Administration)’s disaster loan program. Following natural disasters, there often is a staggering amount of economic damage and even loss of life. A call for government intervention usually follows. In this paper, I use different types of presidencies (i.e., the environmental presidency, the semi-environmental presidency, the pandering presidency, and the classic presidency) to explain the expected impact of current presidential popularity on the willingness of the incumbent U.S. President to authorize federal disaster relief. I also study the influence of the presidential popularity and various related political factors on the intensity of the relief approved and administered through the SBA disaster loan programs. This paper consists of two parts. The first part investigates the impact of the current presidential popularity on the willingness of the incumbent U.S. President to authorize federal disaster relief. Using a unique sample of 1,118 presidential disaster declaration requests from 1991 to 2020, I document an inverted U-shaped effect of the current presidential popularity on the likelihood of a presidential authorization for federal disaster relief. I hypothesize that these results are consistent with the prediction of the semi-environmental presidency model. When the current presidential popularity of the incumbent U.S. President is below 50%, the popularity benefits of using a generous federal disaster relief is important and explains the positive relationship between her popularity and the likelihood of approval. The U.S. President acts like an environmental U.S. President. However, if presidential popularity is greater than 50%, the incumbent U.S. President will be more cautious about authorizing federal disaster relief since the opportunity cost of foregoing important non-environmental related policy initiatives may be higher than the benefits of approving federal disaster relief. The incumbent U.S. President may also supplement the powers granted to her in the U.S. Constitution with the acquired informal powers when her current popularity is higher than 50% in order to realize her own non-environmental related political agenda more easily. In this case, an increase in the U.S. President’s current level of popularity would lead to a decline in the likelihood of her approving federal disaster relief, and they would not be acting as an environmental U.S. President. The second part of this paper investigates how the personal popularity of the incumbent U.S. President impacts the allocation of federal disaster relief to affected counties through the SBA following the authorization of federal disaster relief. I document that the SBA will approve larger amount of disaster loans to disaster-affected households, businesses, and non-profit organizations when the current popularity of the incumbent U.S. President increases. I find that this result is amplified when the incumbent president is (1) a Republican, (2) a second-term president, and (3) not contesting an election in that year. The main findings are robust to different measures of presidential popularity and various estimation methodologies. My contributions in this paper highlight a new venue for politics in climate change in the area of disaster relief. I explore how current public standing of the incumbent U.S. President impacts the disaster relief effort using the SBA disaster loan program. I believe that this is an important area of the interaction of politics and climate finance. Natural disasters and responses to it have become an important topic of the study of climate change, given the increasing frequency and severity of disasters arising from climate change. The politics involving the current pandemic and relief efforts has put this topic in prominent relief (See COVID-19 crisis). / Business Administration/Finance

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Natural hazard-induced disasters have become a priority concern for international humanitarian child protection actors due to the increase in their intensity, frequency, and the risks they pose for children worldwide. In responding to natural hazard-induced disasters, international humanitarian child protection actors are giving increasing attention to the role of the family in promoting children's well-being. The current interventions implemented to support families in these crisis settings are limited by the lack of grounded understanding of what family is in different contexts, and an understanding of how families adapt to contextual stressors. Using a combination of a literature review, meta-ethnography and critical reflection on how to strengthen humanitarian practice, this dissertation examines how families respond, adapt and can be better supported in natural disaster settings. Key findings are that families draw upon cultural strategies of adaptation to navigate changes in their environment and support their children’s well-being. These strategies are often disrupted by external humanitarian responders, however, hindering the ability of families to adapt and causing unintended harm. Current family-level interventions are limited by their reliance on Northern conceptions of the nuclear family, their failure to recognize the rich diversity of family arrangements and supports that exist, and their predominant focus on dynamics within the family unit, often neglecting to fully consider the interactions families have with their social and physical surroundings. This dissertation provides evidence for why and how current interventions to strengthen families in humanitarian contexts should be realigned in a manner that gives greater attention to families’ adaptation strategies, including cultural and relational aspects, builds on local strengths and avoids causing unintended harm.

Thesis advisor: Shanta Pandey / Thesis advisor: Samantha Teixeira / Anthropogenic climate change will push 100 million of the world’s population into poverty in the next decade, and worsen economic, food, and housing insecurity. Natural disasters are some of the most manifest markers of climate change impacts, set to become more intense and frequent as a result of the climate crisis. The brunt of these stressors falls disproportionately on the most marginalized populations across the world - women, children, people with disabilities, and older adults, among other disadvantaged groups. Despite a surge of interest in scholarship on disasters and their unequal impacts, studies on preventative strategies and action have been relatively fewer even though it is widely agreed that post-disaster recovery is enhanced when coupled with pre-disaster readiness and planning. There are multiple empirical and theoretical unknowns around factors promoting or hindering preparedness at micro, mezzo, and macro levels, which are all critical avenues for interventions. This three-paper dissertation addresses this gap in the context of the United States to understand individual and household capacities in dealing with natural disasters. The human capabilities approach helps to frame the overall dissertation examining the associations of social and structural vulnerabilities, self-efficacy, disaster experience, disaster-related information, and participation in social welfare policy with household disaster readiness. The individual papers are further informed by self-efficacy theory and concepts spanning Vulnerability, Absorptive Capacity, and Resilience. Three aims guide this research resulting in three separate papers: Paper 1 examined associations between social vulnerabilities, disaster self-efficacy, and preparedness using nationally representative data from Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Household Surveys 2018. Disaster preparedness was found to vary across self-efficacy and social vulnerability. The confidence in one’s abilities to carry out necessary preparatory action and socioeconomic status were consistently associated with higher preparedness controlling for social vulnerability indicators. Paper 2 assessed the role of social and structural (housing and neighborhood) vulnerabilities in disaster risk reduction employing household-level data from nationally representative American Housing Survey (AHS) 2017. Results suggested that housing insecurity and social vulnerability concurrently were associated with disaster readiness. Further, this paper examined if the association of social vulnerability with disaster preparedness varied by housing insecurity among households in the U.S. Results suggested that housing insecurity moderated the association between minimal preparedness and socioeconomic status, sex of the householder, marital status, and presence of older adults in the house. Paper 3 probed the effects of social vulnerability and welfare policy participation on disaster readiness in U.S. households using the AHS 2017 data. Further, the paper examined the direct and indirect effects of household demographics and participation in social safety net programs (TANF, SSI, SNAP, Housing Vouchers) on household disaster preparedness and found that income, education, race, and having a person with disability at home were statistically mediated at least partially by welfare recipiency. This dissertation examined fissures between intent, capacities, and disaster preparedness with implications for vulnerable communities in the U.S. Results from this three-paper dissertation offer multiple takeaways and intervention points at individual and household levels for social work scholarship, education, and policy. In probing factors that enable or prevent households from taking steps to safeguard themselves against future threats, this dissertation helps inform and affirm values of human dignity and human rights, particularly among vulnerable groups. Overall, the dissertation extends the conversations around individual, contextual, and policy interventions needed to assist vulnerable populations in absorbing and overcoming the multitude of shocks they face. Social and structural barriers to improved household capacities to deal with disasters and other shocks can be addressed through effective policy interventions and a robust safety net. This dissertation examines these elements separately and offers key considerations for research, practice, and policy. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.

Objective: Pre-hospital personnels (PHPs) who work in disasters under extreme pressure, uncertainty, and complex situations are victims of disasters themselves, and there is a link between experiencing such incidents andmental health problems. Because most studies focus on the injured and less on the psychological issues of PHPs, the present study aimed to develop a model to provide relief for PHPs in disasters from a psychological perspective. Methods: A grounded theorymethodology recommended by Corbin and Strauss (2015) was employed. PHPs (n = 24) participated in a semi-structured interview between July 2018 to May 2020. Results: In the analysis of the pre-hospital staff interviews, three main themes were extracted, namely, providing relief with struggle (complexity of incident scenes, command-organizational and occupational challenges), psychological distress (psychological regression and psychological empowerment), and consequences (resilience and job burnout). Seven categories and 22 subcategories were explored from our data via the grounded theory approach Conclusions: The PHPs managed psychological distress with two approaches: psychological self-empowerment and regression, which resulted in resilience and burnout, respectively. Due to the lack of enough support, the resilience of the PHPs was short-term, turned into burnout over time, and affected the structural factors again as a cycle.

OBJECTIVE: Because training in pediatric disaster medicine (PDM) is neither required nor standardized for pediatric residents, we designed and integrated a PDM course into the curriculum of a pediatric residency program and assessed if participation increased participants' knowledge of managing disaster victims. METHODS: We adapted and incorporated a previously studied PDM course into a small-sized pediatric residency program. The curriculum consisted of didactic lectures and experiential learning via simulation with structured debriefing. With IRB approval, the authors conducted a longitudinal series of pretests and posttests to assess knowledge and perceptions. RESULTS: Sixteen eligible residents completed the intervention. Before the course, none of the residents reported experience treating disaster victims. Pairwise comparison of scores revealed a 35% improvement in scores immediately after completing the course (95% confidence interval, 22.73%-47.26%; P < 0.001) and a 23.73% improvement 2 months later (95% confidence interval, 7.12%-40.34%; P < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: Residents who completed this course increased their knowledge of PDM with moderate retention of knowledge gained. There was a significant increase in perceived ability to manage patients in a disaster situation after this educational intervention and the residents' confidence was preserved 2 months later. This PDM course may be used in future formulation of a standardized curriculum.

Reconstruction after natural disasters can represent large peaks in a community’s greenhouse gas emission inventory. Components of the built environment destroyed by natural hazards have their useful life shortened, requiring replacement before functionally necessary. Though the hazard itself does not release greenhouse gasses, the demolition and rebuilding process does, and these are the emissions we can quantify to better understand the climate impacts of disasters. The proposed methodology draws data from existing emission and hazard resource literature and combines the information in a community scale life cycle assessment. Case studies of past disasters are used to refine the methodology and quantify the emissions of single events. The methodology is then annualized projecting the emissions of future hazards. The annualization of greenhouse gasses caused by hazard events provides a baseline from which reduction strategies can be measured against. Hazard mitigation strategies can then be quantified as greenhouse gas reduction strategies for use in Climate Action Plans. The methodology combines the fields of climate action, hazard mitigation, and climate adaptation. Each field attempts to create sustainable and resilient communities, but most plans silo each discipline, missing opportunities that are mutually beneficial. Quantifying the greenhouse gasses associated with recovery following a disaster blends these fields to allow development of comprehensive resilience and sustainability strategies that lower greenhouse gases and decrease risk from existing or projected hazards. An online supplement to this thesis is available online at disasterghg.wordpress.com