Impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake on Hotel Industry in Pacific Tohoku Prefectures: From spatio-temporal dependence of hotel availability

This paper investigates the impact of the Great Japan Earthquake (and subsequent tsunami turmoil) on socio-economic activities by using data on hotel opportunities collected from an electronic hotel booking service. A method to estimate both primary and secondary regional effects of a natural disaster on human behavior is proposed. It is confirmed that temporal variation in the regional share of available hotels before and after a natural disaster may be an indicator to measure the socio-economic impact at each district.