Long-Term Recovery of Female- and Immigrant-Owned Businesses Following the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake

Research is increasingly examining how disasters affect businesses owned by women and immigrants, yet evidence regarding long-term recovery trajectories remains limited and mixed. This study examines the long-term impacts of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake using a unique longitudinal dataset comprising firm attributes and annual sales records from 5,443 businesses over the period 2009–2023. To improve comparability across firms, the analysis combines Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting (IPTW) with a Difference-in-Differences (DID) framework. The primary analyses compare immigrant-owned and female-owned businesses with their Japanese-owned and male-owned counterparts located in areas with seismic intensity of 5 or higher and also compare ownership groups across higher- and lower-intensity areas. The results indicate that immigrant-owned businesses experienced weaker long-term sales recovery than weighted Japanese-owned businesses. The primary comparison yielded an average annual sales disadvantage of approximately 35% of the weighted control group’s FY2009 sales, significant at the 10% level (p = 0.084). The exposure comparison among immigrant-owned businesses also yielded a negative point estimate, although its p-value was slightly above 0.10 (p = 0.114). Sensitivity analyses showed that the negative ATT estimates were generally stable under alternative assumptions regarding industrial composition, missing data treatment, closure definitions, tsunami exposure, and propensity-score specifications, although some estimates did not reach the 10% significance level. In contrast, female-owned businesses generally exhibited weaker long-term sales performance than male-owned businesses, but similar patterns were observed both inside and outside highly affected areas. This suggests that the observed gender gap is more consistent with broader structural differences than with a disaster-specific effect. The findings provide rare evidence that ownership characteristics are associated with long-term business recovery trajectories and that recovery disparities among immigrant-owned businesses can persist for more than a decade after a major disaster.