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Do natural disasters cause an excessive fear of heights? Evidence from the Wenchuan earthquake

This paper uses the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China to examine if the occurrence of a natural disaster can cause an excessive fear of living in upper floors. We rely on potential variations in earthquake risk perceptions by floor level to assess whether the pricing of apartments in lower versus up...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Deng, Guoying, Gan, Li, Hernandez, Manuel A.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier Inc. 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7112347/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32287490
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jue.2015.10.002
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author Deng, Guoying
Gan, Li
Hernandez, Manuel A.
author_facet Deng, Guoying
Gan, Li
Hernandez, Manuel A.
author_sort Deng, Guoying
collection PubMed
description This paper uses the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China to examine if the occurrence of a natural disaster can cause an excessive fear of living in upper floors. We rely on potential variations in earthquake risk perceptions by floor level to assess whether the pricing of apartments in lower versus upper floors is consistent with a disproportionate fear of heights. We use a unique transaction dataset for new apartment units in the affected area. We find that the relative price of low to high floor units, particularly units located in the first and second floor, considerably increased for several months after the earthquake and then returned back to the levels observed prior to the tremor. This temporal increase in relative prices is in line with a higher risk perception and fear, triggered after the earthquake, of living in upper floors, which gradually dissipated over time. The results are robust to alternative model estimations.
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spelling pubmed-71123472020-04-02 Do natural disasters cause an excessive fear of heights? Evidence from the Wenchuan earthquake Deng, Guoying Gan, Li Hernandez, Manuel A. J Urban Econ Article This paper uses the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China to examine if the occurrence of a natural disaster can cause an excessive fear of living in upper floors. We rely on potential variations in earthquake risk perceptions by floor level to assess whether the pricing of apartments in lower versus upper floors is consistent with a disproportionate fear of heights. We use a unique transaction dataset for new apartment units in the affected area. We find that the relative price of low to high floor units, particularly units located in the first and second floor, considerably increased for several months after the earthquake and then returned back to the levels observed prior to the tremor. This temporal increase in relative prices is in line with a higher risk perception and fear, triggered after the earthquake, of living in upper floors, which gradually dissipated over time. The results are robust to alternative model estimations. Elsevier Inc. 2015-11 2015-10-27 /pmc/articles/PMC7112347/ /pubmed/32287490 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jue.2015.10.002 Text en Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Deng, Guoying
Gan, Li
Hernandez, Manuel A.
Do natural disasters cause an excessive fear of heights? Evidence from the Wenchuan earthquake
title Do natural disasters cause an excessive fear of heights? Evidence from the Wenchuan earthquake
title_full Do natural disasters cause an excessive fear of heights? Evidence from the Wenchuan earthquake
title_fullStr Do natural disasters cause an excessive fear of heights? Evidence from the Wenchuan earthquake
title_full_unstemmed Do natural disasters cause an excessive fear of heights? Evidence from the Wenchuan earthquake
title_short Do natural disasters cause an excessive fear of heights? Evidence from the Wenchuan earthquake
title_sort do natural disasters cause an excessive fear of heights? evidence from the wenchuan earthquake
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7112347/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32287490
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jue.2015.10.002
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