The effect of natural disasters on household economic hardship during a pandemic

The year 2020 provided a rare opportunity to examine how US households experience economic hardship when natural disasters occur during a large-scale public health crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a nationally representative sample of adults, this study examines the effect of natural disasters on household economic hardships during a pandemic, measured by food insecurity, mortgage or rent delinquency, and unemployment. The study estimated individual fixed-effect models after controlling for time trends and time-variant covariates. We find that while a disaster incident in the community during a pandemic is not associated with household economic hardships in aggregate, its effects are experienced differently by people according to the community-level severity of COVID-19 and the individual-level factors characterized as vulnerability and resilience. Our findings have implications for targeted disaster relief and for building resilience among residents to adverse events.