Should We Flee? The Mortality and Economic Impacts of Hurricane Evacuation Orders

Author(s)/Creator(s)

• Lucas Kaplan, Syracuse UniversityFollow

Description/Abstract

I estimate the mortality and county-level regional economic impacts of hurricane evacuation orders using a novel instrumental variables framework. Relative to similarly affected but non-evacuated areas, evacuated counties experience fewer deaths but lower personal income, employment, and business establishments into the second year following the storm, likely stemming from delayed returns in wealthier neighborhoods. I then develop a threshold decision rule that balances the mortality benefits against these persistent economic costs and apply this framework to orders issued from 2016–2022. Incorporating these persistent economic costs alters policy evaluation: the largest orders generate net benefits that dwarf their costs, but the typical order does not clear the cost–benefit threshold—only about a quarter of recent evacuation orders remain justified under this framework, compared to 64 percent when evaluating mortality benefits alone.

Document Type

Working Paper

Date

7-30-2026

Keywords

Evacuation, hurricanes, mortality, disaster recovery

Language

English

Series

Working Papers Series

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Alex Rothenberg, David Popp, Maria Zhu, and John Cawley for their guidance, comments, and advice. I thank Daniel Brent for his thoughtful discussion of the paper, as well as participants at WCERE 2026, the Health Economics, Labor, and Public (HELP) group at Syracuse University, and the CPR Social Policy Working Group. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from a Syracuse University Graduate School Summer Dissertation Fellowship. The findings and conclusions in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Center for Health Statistics or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All errors are my own.

Disciplines

Economic Policy | Economics | Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration | Public Policy

ISSN

1525-3066

Recommended Citation

Kaplan, Lucas, "Should We Flee? The Mortality and Economic Impacts of Hurricane Evacuation Orders" (2026). Center for Policy Research. 533.
https://surface.syr.edu/cpr/533

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.