Related papers: State capacity and vulnerability to natural disast…

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and…

Tolerance implies enduring trying circumstances with a fair and objective attitude. To determine whether evolutionary advantages might be stemming from diverse levels of tolerance in a population, we study a spatial public goods game, where…

In a globalised world, inflation in a given country may be becoming less responsive to domestic economic activity, while being increasingly determined by international conditions. Consequently, understanding the international sources of…

The hypothesis that living systems can benefit from operating at the vicinity of critical points has gained momentum in recent years. Criticality may confer an optimal balance between exceedingly ordered and too noisy states. We here…

This paper investigates whether socioeconomic factors are important for the hurricane performance of the electric power system in Florida. The investigation is performed using the Random Forest classifier with Mean Decrease of Accuracy…

I devise a novel approach to evaluate the effectiveness of fiscal policy in the short run with multi-category treatment effects and inverse probability weighting based on the potential outcome framework. This study's main contribution to…

Crime is an economically important activity, sometimes called the industry of crime. It may represent a mechanism of wealth distribution but also a social and economic charge because of the cost of the law enforcement system. Sometimes it…

Reliability (survival analysis, to biostatisticians) is a key ingredient for mak- ing decisions that mitigate the risk of failure. The other key ingredient is utility. A decision theoretic framework harnesses the two, but to invoke this…

I study how political bias and audience costs impose domestic institutional constraints that affect states' capacity to reach peaceful agreements during crises. With a mechanism design approach, I show that the existence of peaceful…

In an increasingly complex, mobile and interconnected world, we face growing threats of disasters, whether by chance or deliberately. Disruption of coordinated response and recovery efforts due to organizational, technical, procedural,…

Corruption, fraud, and unethical activities have emerged as significant obstacles to global economic, political, and social progress. Although many empirical studies have focused on country-level corruption metrics, this study is the first…

Flood forecasts are crucial for effective individual and governmental protective action. The vast majority of flood-related casualties occur in developing countries, where providing spatially accurate forecasts is a challenge due to…

Disasters frequently exceed established hazard models, revealing blind spots where unforeseen impacts and vulnerabilities hamper effective response. This perspective paper contends that situational awareness (SA)-the ability to perceive,…

The governance of the political and economic world order builds on a complex architecture of international treaties at various geographical scales. In a historical phase of high institutional turbulence, assessing the stability of such…

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…

We study corruption as a generalized epidemic process on the graph of social relationships. The main difference to classical epidemic processes is the strong nonlinear dependence of the transmission probability on the local density of…

Models for epidemic spread typically account for variable risk factors but do not account for the correlation between behavior and risk. Here we extend these models to account for such correlations. We find that a positive correlation…

This study presents a framework for assessing urban critical infrastructure resilience during extreme events, such as hurricanes. The approach combines GIS and network analysis with open remote sensing data of the aftermath, vector data on…

Scientists agree about the urgency of the problem of climate change. Most citizens, however, pay little attention to gradually increasing temperature levels. Growing numbers of natural disasters in the world might then play a fundamental…

Damage cost curves -- relating the typical damage of a natural hazard to its physical magnitude -- represent an indispensable ingredient necessary for climate change impact assessments. Combining such curves with the occurrence probability…