E-CAT Software Now Available

The CREATE Economic Consequence Analysis Tool (E-CAT) is intended for policymakers and analysts who need quick estimates of the economic impact of threats listed in the Homeland Security National Risk Characterization (HSNRC) Register.  It provides estimates of the impact of terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and technological accidents on US gross domestic product and employment.  It is programmed in Excel Visual Basic to facilitate its use.

E-CAT is the culmination of 10 years of research at CREATE in advancing state-of-the-art of Economic Consequence Analysis (ECA) by incorporating the effects of resilience and behavioral responses from a broad range of threats.  The core of this research has been integrating broader features of consequences into the state-of-the-art tool of macroeconomic simulation and policy analysis — computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling.  E-CAT involves a 8-step process beginning with the enumeration of a broad range of potential impacts for each threat, quantification of direct impact drivers, linkage of these drivers to variables in a national CGE model, running the CGE model hundreds of times varying key parameters particular to each threat, generating regression estimates from the simulation results, incorporating uncertainty, modeling validation, and transporting the reduced-form regression results to a user-friendly spreadsheet program.

The link below provides a version of the Economic Consequence Analysis Tool (E- CAT) software.  To operate software, you are referred to the User Guide available in Appendix B of the following book:

Rose, A., F. Prager, Z. Chen and S. Chatterjee. 2017. Economic Consequence Analysis of Disasters: The E-CAT Software Tool.  Singapore:  Springer Publishers. doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2567-9

The software is currently operative for the following nine modules listed on the User Interface page:

  • Human Pandemic
  • Nuclear Attack
  • Animal Disease
  • Earthquake
  • Flood
  • Tornado
  • Aviation System Disruption
  • Maritime Cyber Disruption
  • Oil Spill

Additional modules are under consideration.   Any questions regarding the software should be addressed to CREATE Director and Senior Research Fellow Adam Rose at: [email protected]

Other publications on the E-CAT include:

Prager, F. Z. Chen, and A. Rose. 2018. “Estimating and Comparing Economic Consequences of Multiple Threats: A Reduced-Form Computable General Equilibrium Approach,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 31: 45-57. doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2018.02.014

Prager, F., D. Wei, and A. Rose. 2017. “Total Economic Consequences of an Influenza Outbreak in the United States,” Risk Analysis 37(1): 4-19. doi:10.1111/risa.12625

Chen, Z., A. Rose, F. Prager, and S. Chatterjee. 2016. “Economic Consequences of Aviation System Disruptions: A Reduced-Form Computable General Equilibrium Analysis,” Transportation Research A, 95: 207–226. doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2016.09.027

Rose, A. 2015. “Macroeconomic Consequences of Terrorist Attacks: Estimation for the Analysis of Policies and Rules," in C. Mansfield and V. K. Smith (eds.), Benefit Transfer for the Analysis of DHS Policies and Rules, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. doi.org/10.4337/9781784711085.00016