When a wildfire destroys a neighborhood, you might think home values there would plummet. But in a 2020 academic paper, Carles Vergara-Alert and his co-authors looked at California fire data (between 2001 and 2015) and found the opposite — properties destroyed by wildfires became significantly more valuable. Carles is a professor of finance and real estate at IESE Business School. In today's bonus episode, Greg Rosalsky talks with Carles about the economic reasons behind this and how it plays a role in the wildfire crisis and the home insurance crisis California finds itself in.

This is another edition of Behind The Newsletter, where Greg shares his interviews with policy makers, business leaders, and economists who appear in The Planet Money Newsletter.

For more, check out The Planet Money Newsletter to hear the story of an economist who survived a wildfire and is now taking on California's insurance crisis.
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/01/23/g-s1-44265/california-wildfire-homes-insurance-prices-crisis

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