IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/restat/v107y2025i5p1448-1459.html

Disastrous Discretion: Political Bias in Relief Allocation Varies Substantially with Disaster Severity

Author

Listed:
  • Stephan A. Schneider

    (IIES–Stockholm University, CESifo, KOF–ETH Zurich)

  • Sven Kunze

    (Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI)

Abstract

Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of all hurricane strikes from 1965 to 2018 along with changes in political alignment. We show that decisions are unbiased when disasters are either very strong or weak. Only after medium-intensity hurricanes do areas governed by presidents' co-partisans receive up to twice as many declarations. This hump-shaped political bias explains 8.3% of overall relief spending, totaling about USD 400 million per year.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephan A. Schneider & Sven Kunze, 2025. "Disastrous Discretion: Political Bias in Relief Allocation Varies Substantially with Disaster Severity," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 107(5), pages 1448-1459, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:107:y:2025:i:5:p:1448-1459
    DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_01319
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01319
    Download Restriction: Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1162/rest_a_01319?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:107:y:2025:i:5:p:1448-1459. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: The MIT Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.