Opportunity from disaster: Evidence of the Christchurch earthquake’s effec…

Research papers, Victoria University of Wellington

We estimate the causal effects of a large unanticipated natural disaster on high schoolers’ university enrolment decisions and subsequent medium-term labour market outcomes. Using national administrative data after a destructive earthquake in New Zealand, we estimate that the disaster raises tertiary education enrolment of recent high school graduates by 6.1 percentage points. The effects are most pronounced for males, students who are academically weak relative to their peers, and students from schools directly damaged by the disaster. As relatively low ability males are overrepresented in sectors of the labour market helped by the earthquake, greater demand for university may stem from permanent changes in deeper behavioural parameters such as risk aversion or time preference, rather than as a coping response to poor economic opportunities.

Ground motion simulations of great earthquakes on the Alpine Fault: effect…

Research papers, University of Canterbury Library

© 2017 The Royal Society of New Zealand. This paper discusses simulated ground motion intensity, and its underlying modelling assumptions, for great earthquakes on the Alpine Fault. The simulations utilise the latest understanding of wave propagation physics, kinematic earthquake rupture descriptions and the three-dimensional nature of the Earth's crust in the South Island of New Zealand. The effect of hypocentre location is explicitly examined, which is found to lead to significant differences in ground motion intensities (quantified in the form of peak ground velocity, PGV) over the northern half and southwest of the South Island. Comparison with previously adopted empirical ground motion models also illustrates that the simulations, which explicitly model rupture directivity and basin-generated surface waves, lead to notably larger PGV amplitudes than the empirical predictions in the northern half of the South Island and Canterbury. The simulations performed in this paper have been adopted, as one possible ground motion prediction, in the ‘Project AF8’ Civil Defence Emergency Management exercise scenario. The similarity of the modelled ground motion features with those observed in recent worldwide earthquakes as well as similar simulations in other regions, and the notably higher simulated amplitudes than those from empirical predictions, may warrant a re-examination of regional impact assessments for major Alpine Fault earthquakes.