Natural disasters and self-reported well-being: a review of the literature

In this chapter we review the empirical literature on the impact of natural disasters on subjective well-being (SWB). We start out with explaining the concept(s) of self-reported well-being, e.g. happiness and life satisfaction, and report the major results of SWB research from an economic perspective. We also introduce the major sources of international SWB data and present some first empirical evidence on the correlation between the occurrence of natural disasters and SWB on the country-level. Afterwards we survey the three major strands of the literature. The first strand of the literature belongs the environmental evaluation literature and uses well-being regressions to evaluate the costs of certain natural disasters. The second strand of the literature focuses more directly on evaluating the direct and indirect well-being effects of natural disasters. Finally, the third strand of the literature is concerned with the effects of disaster risk on self-reported measures of individual well-being. The survey closes with some conclusions and a discussion of open research questions.