Place matters: the role of poverty, natural disasters, and economic shocks on well-being

Rossetti Youlton, Magdalena (2024) Place matters: the role of poverty, natural disasters, and economic shocks on well-being. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

In this thesis, I analyze the relationship between residential location, the shocks that can disrupt lives, and how these factors influence well-being, across three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 illustrates how countries can measure the concentration of poverty at small levels of aggregation using census data. Using the 2017 Chilean Census and data on the location of public and private services, I construct a spatially decomposable multidimensional poverty index. Then, using global and local spatial methods of autocorrelation, I assess the degree of clustering of multidimensional poverty and identify the location of patterns of poverty at three spatial levels of aggregation: regional, municipal, and at the census district level. I find that concentrations are more common than spatial anomalies at all levels of spatial aggregation. As we move from larger to smaller spatial scales, I identify more people as living in a pattern of poverty, with 14.6% of the national population at the regional level, 43.7%, and 58.5% at the municipal and district level, respectively. Chapter 3 analyzes a strategy employed by households to cope with cash shortfalls, which involves someone who is not the head’s child or partner, joining the family unit, resulting in a "doubled-up" household. Using longitudinal data from Chile, I examine the effects of business cycles, measured through changes in labor market conditions, on the likelihood of individuals moving into and out of these doubled-up households. The analysis reveals that a one-percent reduction in job availability increases the probability of co-residing by 0.1% to 0.2%. Conversely, I find that a 1% rise in job loss decreases the probability of moving out of a doubled-up household by 0.5% to 2%. Chapter 4 uses administrative longitudinal data from Chile spanning from 2016 to 2023 to analyze the impact of natural disasters on a measure of relative income, a socioeconomic score known as RSH score. Employing a heterogeneous difference-in-differences design with multiple time and cohort specifications, this study answers two research questions: What is the effect of natural disasters on RSH score? How does this effect evolve over time? I find that natural disasters have a negative impact on RSH scores for 28 months after the event. However, around 40 months post-disaster they increase their relative income. Moreover, an event-study approach reveals that the impact of natural disasters reaches its peak around eight months after the emergency, with recovery beginning in the ninth month.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Magdalena Rossetti Youlton
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
Sets:	Departments > Social Policy
Supervisor:	Jenkins, Stephen P. and Özcan, Berkay
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4823

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