The impact of natural disasters: How the 2009 earthquake transformed the economy of L’Aquila’s labour market area

Abstract

We investigate the economic impact of the 2009 earthquake in the L’Aquila labour market area (Italy) through a synthetic difference-in-differences method applied to the 2004–2013 period. The shock immediately disrupted the local economy with a 27.3 % and 38.2 % reduction in employment and the number of firms. However, these effects are not statistically significant when measured 5 years after the earthquake, suggesting that a rebound process affected both dimensions. Such findings are the result of heterogeneous dynamics across the manufacturing and service sectors: the former showed a prolonged contraction in the number of employees and firms, whereas the latter experienced a strong recovery after a short-term negative effect. These dynamics have induced an increase in L’Aquila’s sector dissimilarity from other local labour market areas in Italy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.