The FIMA NFIP’s Redacted Policies and Redacted Claims Data Sets

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 a dataset containing nearly 50 million observations. Researchers can now download and evaluate the 47,271,207 flood policy observations (2009-2018) and the 2,418,007 flood claims observations (1970-2019) in an easily accessible machine-readable format, bypassing the complex request procedures of the past. What exactly is included in this policy and claims data? How can it be used? We provide real estate academics and industry professionals with the details of 43 policy data variables and the 36 claims data variables, which we group into seven categories: Locational, Structural, Occupancy, Policy Terms, Elevation and Ratings, Premiums, and Claims. In an effort to aid researchers with the complexities of working with the data, we provide sample R-code that can be used and altered to analyze NFIP data. Finally, for illustration, we merge the NFIP Data with data from both the American Community Survey and Zillow to study the determinants of flood insurance take-up.

Keywords: FEMA, NFIP, OpenFEMA, flood, insurance, takeup rates, Write Your Own (WYO), Base Flood Elevation, FIRM

JEL Classification: G00