Disruptive Effects of Natural Disasters

Disruptive Effects of Natural Disasters: The 1906 San Francisco Fire (Job Market Paper) Natural disasters are growing in frequency globally. Understanding how vulnerable populations respond to these disasters is essential for an effective policy response. This paper explores the short- and long-run consequences of the 1906 San Francisco Fire, one of the largest fires in American history. It destroyed nearly half of the residential buildings in the city. Historical records suggest that exogenous factors such as wind and the availability of water determined where the fire stopped. Residents of the affected areas had to evacuate, but the city was rebuilt within a few years. Using linked Census records, I follow residents of San Francisco and their children from 1900 up to 1940. Destroyed and unaffected areas may have been different on average, so to control for confounding factors, I implement spatial regression discontinuity design across the boundary of the razed district. I find that the fire increased the short-run migration rate of affected residents by 6.3 percentage points. Victims switched to lower paying occupations and were less likely to be self-employed in 1910 and the following decades. Experiencing the disaster disrupted children's school attendance and led to an average loss of six months of education. As a consequence, there is more downward and less upward intergenerational mobility among affected children. Overall, my findings reject a reversal of fortune for the survivors of the disaster. Childhood Migration and Education: Evidence from Indonesia Millions of families migrate every year in search of better opportunities. Whether these opportunities materialize for the children brought with them depends on the quality of the destination that their parents selected. Using Indonesian Census data, I find that average differences in educational outcomes are small between children who moved domestically and those who did not. However, conditional on having migrated, destination turns out to be very important. Exploiting variation in the age of migration, I show that children who spend more time growing up in better districts have higher graduation rates and more years of completed schooling. These effects are persistent and carry over to better labor market outcomes. Overall, my findings suggest substantial heterogeneity of returns to childhood migration with respect to destination. The Gender Wage Gap Revisited: Evidence from Worker Deaths (with Hannah Illing) Previous literature has established that women earn less than men, a pattern that is strikingly stable across countries, yet declining over time. One challenge when studying the gender wage gap is that men and women differ in (un)observable characteristics, and that women may sort into different jobs than men. In this paper we investigate how substitutable women and men are if they work in the exact same job position. We first identify unexpected worker deaths in German social security data in 1980-2019. We then compute the wage gap between the deceased worker and their successor for different gender combinations. We find that holding the job position constant, men who replace deceased women earn substantially higher wages. The opposite is true when women follow deceased men. The implied "replacement gender wage gap" for full-time workers in the 1980 to 2019 period is about 14 percent. In addition, we find that the gap has decreased since 1980. It is higher in West Germany compared to East Germany.