Abstract

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) was created in 1968 and allows homeowners, renters, and businesses to purchase flood insurance from the federal government. During the summer of 2019, without compromising privacy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released two datasets containing roughly 50 million flood insurance policy observations (beginning in 2009) and 2.5 million flood insurance claims (beginning in 1970). Researchers can now download and evaluate the entire policies and claims datasets in machine-readable format, bypassing the complex request procedures of the past. We explore what is included in this policy and claims data and how they might be used to examine flood insurance related topics. We provide real estate academics and industry professionals with the details of the 44 usable policy data variables and the 37 usable claims data variables, which we group into seven categories: Locational, Structural, Occupancy, Policy Terms, Zone/Elevation/Rating, Premiums, and Claims. In an effort to aid researchers with the initial complexities of working with the data, we provide sample R-code that can be altered to analyze NFIP data. Finally, for illustration, we demonstrate how the NFIP data can be merged with data from both the American Community Survey and Zillow to study the determinants of flood insurance take-up.

摘要

国家洪水保险计划（NFIP）成立于1968年，允许房主，房客和企业从联邦政府购买洪水保险。在2019年夏季，在不影响隐私的情况下，联邦紧急事务管理局（FEMA）发布了两个数据集，其中包含大约5000万份洪水保险政策观察结果（2009年开始）和250万份洪水保险索赔（1970年开始）。现在，研究人员可以绕过过去的复杂请求过程，以机器可读的格式下载和评估整个策略和索赔数据集。我们将探讨此保单和理赔数据中包括的内容以及如何将其用于检查与洪水保险相关的主题。位置，结构，占用率，保单条款，区域/高程/费率，保费和索赔。为了帮助研究人员处理数据的最初复杂性，我们提供了可以更改为分析NFIP数据的示例R代码。最后，为说明起见，我们演示了如何将NFIP数据与美国社区调查和Zillow的数据合并，以研究洪水保险承保的决定因素。