Resilience to natural disasters - Insurance penetration, institutions, and disaster types

•New empirical evidence about the economic effects of natural disasters.•The effect of natural disasters is mitigated by access to insurance.•Insurance penetration and good institutions are complements in mitigating disaster effects.•Differences in effects across different types of disasters.

Using newly available data, this note provides new evidence suggesting that private insurance penetration mitigates the negative economic effects of natural disasters. The results document heterogeneous effects across differentially institutionalized countries and across different disaster types.