Natural Catastrophes and Financial Development

Master's thesis - Natural Catastrophes and Financial Development Pavla Mikul'ıkov'a Academic year 2022/2023 Natural disasters affect lives of many people every year. Using a panel dataset of 214 countries from 1970 to 2021, this thesis analyses the impact of disasters on financial development, namely on depth, efficiency, access, and sta- bility, using fixed effects and system GMM estimators. The main findings imply that depth and stability are negatively affected by disasters, and the impact is more pronounced for lower-income countries. On the other hand, efficiency and access provide no consistent results. There is no type of disasters, e.g., biologi- cal or geophysical, that would have a significant impact on all types of financial development. The effect probably varies due to the different characteristics of disaster types. 1