  This paper investigates the impact of the Great Japan Earthquake (and
subsequent tsunami turmoil) on socio-economic activities by using data on hotel
opportunities collected from an electronic hotel booking service. A method to
estimate both primary and secondary regional effects of a natural disaster on
human behavior is proposed. It is confirmed that temporal variation in the
regional share of available hotels before and after a natural disaster may be
an indicator to measure the socio-economic impact at each district.
