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Natural Disasters and the Nonprofit Sector

Mayleen Cortez-Rodriguez

arXiv 3 Sep 2026 · Statistics — Applications

arXiv:2609.04136 · PDF · Extracted main text

Abstract

When natural disasters strike, individuals, communities, and even entire countries can suffer. Researchers have studied the impacts of disasters on various factors of interest, from mental health, to poverty, to economic activity. However, the impact of disasters on the nonprofit sector is understudied despite the nonprofit sector's perhaps surprising role in local or national economies as well as its role in disaster response and recovery. Thus, we study the effect of natural disaster damage on different county-level nonprofit outcomes using a panel dataset spanning 1991 to 2021 and causal inference methods tailored to panel data. Contrary to prior work, which found small but positive associations between disaster damage and nonprofit revenue or assets, we find no evidence of a causal effect.

Citation extraction

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appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 37% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Kosuke Imai, In Song Kim, and Erik H Wang (2023) Matching methods for causal inference with time-series cross-sectional data0.97413492%
2Anita A Pena, Sammy Zahran, Anthony Underwood, and Stephan Weiler (2014) Effect of natural disasters on local nonprofit activity0.8307557%
3Kevin T Smiley, Junia Howell, and James R Elliott (2018) Disasters, local organizations, and poverty in the usa, 1998 to 20150.7374350%
4Peter M Aronow and Cyrus Samii (2017) Estimating average causal effects under general interference, with application to a social network experiment0.7373367%
5Adam Rauh, In Song Kim, and Kosuke Imai (2025) Panelmatch: Matching methods for causal inference with time-series cross-section data0.73732100%
6U.S Government Accountability Office (2012) Federal disaster assistance: Improved criteria needed to assess a jurisdiction's capability to respond and recover on its own0.6443267%
7Dmitry Arkhangelsky and Guido Imbens (2024) Causal models for longitudinal and panel data: a survey0.5113233%
8Yuhao Ba, Jessica Berrett, and Jason Coupet (2023) Panel data analysis: A guide for nonprofit studies0.5113233%
9Jean C Digitale, Jeffrey N Martin, and Medellena Maria Glymour (2022) Tutorial on directed acyclic graphs0.5112250%
10A Miguel, ROBINS HERNAN, and M James (2023) Causal inference: what if0.5112250%

Showing the top 10 of 62 scored citations.