Document Type
Article
Abstract
Hurricanes and tropical cyclones have become more severe over the past 40 years and are expected to intensify in the future due to climate change. In this paper, we seek to understand how natural disaster experiences shape precautionary economic behaviors in response to future risks. We combine daily, household-level consumer goods purchase data from 2008-2018 with hurricane hit and warning data and use propensity score trimming to obtain a sample of households with a similar probability of receiving a hurricane warning to mitigate the problem of endogenous residential sorting. Using a triple difference-in-differences model, we find that past hurricane experience significantly influences household preparedness for impending storms. While households without prior-year hurricane exposure tend to stock up on emergency supplies only after receiving warnings, experienced households prepare earlier, increasing their purchases up to a week before warnings and prioritizing essential items. The degree of preparedness varies based on the severity of past disasters, household income, and the disaster risk level of the area.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Journal of Risk Uncertainty, 2026.
APA Citation
Bilen, E., L. Sheldon, T., & Zhan, C. (2026). Learning from the storm: The impact of hurricane experience on future disaster preparedness. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11166-026-09483-z
Rights
© The Author(s) 2026 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.