IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/diw/diwsop/diw_sp1224.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Rising Waters, Falling Well-Being: The Effects of the 2013 East German Flood on Subjective Well-Being

Author

Listed:
  • Sachintha Fernando
  • Katharina Kolb
  • Christoph Wunder

Abstract

This paper employs a panel event study design to examine the causal effects of the 2013 flood disaster in East Germany on subjective well-being. We merge geo-spatial flood data with longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to identify individuals in affected municipalities. Our results show that those affected by the flood report a significant life satisfaction drop of 0.17 points on an 11-point scale, which is equivalent to a 2.5% fall from pre-flood levels, in the year after the flood. The effect is more severe in peripheral areas than in central areas, and for low-income individuals than for high-income individuals. However, the effect dissipates by 2015. Additionally, we observe a notable initial decrease in health satisfaction, followed by recovery, while financial satisfaction was largely unaffected.

Suggested Citation

  • Sachintha Fernando & Katharina Kolb & Christoph Wunder, 2025. "Rising Waters, Falling Well-Being: The Effects of the 2013 East German Flood on Subjective Well-Being," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 1224, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
    • Handle: RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1224
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.953254.de/diw_sp1224.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    natural disasters; flood; quality of life; life satisfaction; health satisfaction; financial satisfaction;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being
    • Q51 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Valuation of Environmental Effects
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1224. 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: Bibliothek (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sodiwde.html .

    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.