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This book, composed of 34 chapters, provides a comprehensive discussion on the current state of and emerging trends in the field of disaster management. It is composed of 10 sections: (1) disaster management and homeland security: a prologue; (2) training, mitigation and medical preparedness; (3) the crucial role of communication in disaster management and homeland security; (4) disasters and mass casualty incidents (MCI): incident site command and control, and point-of-care testing; (5) medical management of complex disasters and MCI victims in hospitals; (6) securing the homeland: the medical way; (7) defeating emerging health threats: managing by prophylactic and therapeutic approaches; (8) handling psychosocial issues: a difference in perspective (developed and developing nations); (9) bridging the great divide: the challenge of managing disasters and MCIs in resource-poor settings; and, (10) post-disaster relief, rehabilitation and recovery. The book is geared towards disaster planners, medical professionals, military personnel and emergency responders, international agencies, government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other agencies engaged in disaster mitigation and management, disaster management professionals, planners, researchers, environmentalists, academicians and students.

We propose a model with involuntary unemployment, incomplete markets, and nominal rigidity, in which the effects of government spending are state-dependent. An increase in government purchases raises aggregate demand, tightens the labor market and reduces unemployment. This in turn lowers unemployment risk and thus precautionary saving, leading to a larger response of private consumption than in a model with perfect insurance. The output multiplier is further amplified through a composition effect, as the fraction of high-consumption households in total population increases in response to the spending shock. These features, along with the matching frictions in the labor market, generate significantly larger multipliers in recessions than in expansions. As the pool of job seekers is larger during downturns than during expansions, the concavity of the job-finding probability with respect to market tightness implies that an increase in government spending reduces unemployment risk more in the former case than in the latter, giving rise to countercyclical multipliers.

We consider the division of a territory into administrative districts responsible for providing a set of goods and services to residents who aresensitive to service congestion. We deduce the optimal architecture of public governance (i.e. the division of government into several levels, thedistribution of services among them, their number of jurisdictions and the size of their administrations), which depends on how citizens weigh theperformance capacity of administrations and the services they produce. We compare it to a decentralized organization where each jurisdiction is free to choose the size and scope of its administration. The resulting architecture generally involves more countries with fewer levels of administration than the optimal one. We use our results to estimate citizen preferences using U.S. data. We find that the country is divided into two zones ("Northeast & West" and "Midwest & South") whose estimated values are statistically different.