Predicting long-term business recovery from disaster : a comparison of the Loma Prieta earthquake and Hurricane Andrew.

"Paper submitted for presentation at the 2000 Annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Washington, D.C., August 12-16"

Bibliography: p. 21-24

Although in recent years social scientists have paid increasing attention to the impacts of disasters on the private sector, little is currently known about how disasters affect the long-term economic viability of businesses. Most studies of disaster recovery have taken either households or entire communities as the unit of analysis, and those that have looked at the economic impacts of disasters tend to focus on large levels of aggregation, such as regional economies, rather than on individual firms. When researchers have studied how disasters affect individual businesses and economic activity, they have generally focused on short-term impacts, rather than the longer-term consequences of disaster victimization. Thus, it is not currently known whether disasters have any discernible longer-term consequences for individual businesses. This paper addresses that issue by developing a model explaining long-term business recovery from disaster - that is, business well-being measured several years after disaster impact. Compares long-term recovery outcomes among businesses that experienced the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and Hurricane Andrew, which struck South Florida in 1992