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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...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Elsevier Inc.
2015
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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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7112347 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | Elsevier Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
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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