are consistent with our finding on the relationship between ex-ante actions and the disaster risks.

These findings have important implications for the design of public safety net policies, and raise several questions that deserve further investigation. For example, are ex-post actions unimportant in Malawi owing to ineffectiveness of the public assistance scheme? On the other hand, the importance of ex-post public assistance in Ethiopia could be correlated both with better program effectiveness in terms of targeting emergency assistance as well as with greater difficulties faced by poor Ethiopian households in undertaking ex-ante risk-mitigating actions. In Bangladesh, do different types of households benefit from ex-post and ex-ante actions, with better-off households better able to undertake ex-ante actions, and poorer households benefiting from well-targeted emergency assistance?

All in all, our results show that among the ex-ante actions considered, the accumulation of human capital within the household prior to disasters helps mitigate the negative effects of disasters in both the short and long run. Our results suggest that efforts to increase investment in human capital in disaster-prone countries should be strengthened to mitigate the disaster impacts (i.e., income variance), despite the appeal of urgency and emergency assistance once disaster strikes.

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