Hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, flooding, natural disasters are a part of life, and

with climate change they're probably going to keep getting worse.

For a lot of people, disasters have meant having to leave their homes, either to avoid danger

or to start over afterwards, and starting over can mean a lot of different things, moving

to a new city, maybe finding a new job and new friends, and possibly even some unexpected

changes in your health.

From the Freakonomics Rated Network, this is Freakonomics MD.

I'm Bob Ujena.

I'm a medical doctor, but I'm also an economist, and in each episode, I dissect an interesting

question at the sweet spot between health and economics.

Today, how was our health affected by the place we live?

Where are the greatest inequalities?

And is there an approach to changing these inequalities that could actually work?

For someone who researches questions like this, a natural disaster can be an ideal scenario

for a study because these disasters often force a lot of people to move all at once.

I know that sounds strange, no one wants people to lose their homes, but when that happens,

some insightful economists will want to seize the opportunity to learn something new.

Tatiana Derugana and David Molotor are too such economists.

Tatiana and David are colleagues at the Geese College of Business at the University of

Illinois at our banish campaign.

They wanted to understand how where we live affects how long we live, and they realized

that natural disasters could help them do that.

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