The Long-run Effects of Floods at Municipality Level : Evidence From Spain, 1877–2011

This paper analyzes the persistence of the effects that natural disasters exert in the long run at the urban level. This has been done by combining information of flood events and the size of Spanish municipalities that cover the period from 1842 to 2011. Using recent developments in differences-in-differences estimation methods, we show that these environmental hazards have an adverse and transitory influence on mu- nicipality size when there are casualties involved. This funding suggests that, as it is also the case of shocks of other nature, the effects of natural disasters on the urban structure fade away in time