There has been little discussion of what archival accounting evidence can contribute to an understanding of a society’s response to a natural disaster. This article focuses on two severe earthquakes which struck New Zealand in 1929 and 1931 and makes two main contributions to accounting history. First, by discussing evidence from archival sources, it contributes to the literature on accounting in a disaster. This provides a basis for future theory building and for future comparative research related to the response to more recent natural disasters such as the 2010–11 Canterbury earthquakes. Secondly, it questions the conclusions of recently published research concerning the role of central and local government in this and recent earthquakes.
We aim to investigate the role of insurance in business recovery following the devastating Christchurch earthquake in February, 22nd, 2011. We analyze data from two business surveys conducted after the earthquake to examine how insurance affected business operation in the aftermath of the earthquake both in the short-term and longer-term. For the short-term analysis, we use a combination of propensity score matching (PSM) and linear probability model (LPM) to analyze the data. We first estimate the propensity scores for insurance take-up of each firm conditional on the firm’s individual characteristics. Stratification based on the estimated propensity scores is used to match the treated (insured) and the control (uninsured) firms. We then estimate the probability of firms’ continuing operations with a set of control variables to account for the level of damage and disruption caused by the quake in each stratum. We find little evidence of any beneficial effect of insurance coverage on business continuity in the short-run. For the longer-term analysis, we analyze the available survey data using logistic regression. The result suggests that business interruption insurance significantly promotes increased level of long-term productivity for surviving firms following the earthquake.
The purpose of this study is to analyse the felt earthquake impacts, resilience and recovery of organizations in Canterbury by comparing three business sectors (accommodation/food services, Education/Training and Manufacturing). A survey of the three sectors in 2013 of Canterbury organizations impacted by the earthquakes revealed significant differences between the three sectors on felt earthquake impacts and resilience. On recovery and mitigation factors, the accommodation/food services sector is not significantly different from the other two sectors. Overall, the survey results presented here indicate that the Accommodation/Food Services sector was the least impacted by the earthquakes in comparison to the Education/Training and Manufacturing sectors. Implications for post-disaster management and recovery of the accommodation sector are suggested.
