Time: 2023/03/21 (Tue.), 8:00 – 9:00 am (Beijing Time)

Title:    Mandated vs. Voluntary Adaptation to Natural Disasters: The Case of U.S. Wildfires

About the speaker:

Patrick is an assistant professor and environmental economist at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He studies how people respond to environmental threats like climate change, air pollution, and wildfires. Some of his recent work includes estimating the impact of temperature on tweets to understand preferences for climate change, assessing the implicit subsidy of federal wildfire suppression, projecting how climate change will alter peak electricity demand, and considering how consumers respond to defaults in electricity consumption.

Abstract:

Despite escalating losses in climate-related disasters, adoption of protective technologies and behaviors is limited by risk misperception, externalities, and insurance market frictions. One response to these market failures is to mandate investment. We measure the effect of California's wildfire building codes on own and neighboring structure survival using data for nearly all US homes exposed to wildfires since 2000. Differences across jurisdictions and vintages reveal remarkable resilience effects of building codes. These codes also increase survival of neighboring homes by reducing structure-to-structure spread. Using the results, we develop and estimate a model of the social benefits of wildfire building standards.