Despite the tremendous destruction wrought by catastrophes, social science holds few quantitative assessments of explanations for the rate of recovery. This article illuminates four factors - damage, population density, human capital, and economic capital - thought to explain the variation in...

While a large literature exists on the siting of controversial facilities, few theories about spatial location have been tested on large samples. Using a new dataset from Japan, this paper demonstrates that state agencies choose localities judged weakest in local civil society as host...

Despite the tremendous destruction wrought by disasters and catastrophes around the world, we have few quantitative assessments of potential explanations for the rate of post-disaster recovery. This article lays out five hypotheses explaining variation in the pace of population recovery...