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Working Paper
On the GDP Effects of Severe Physical Hazards
We assess the impacts from physical hazards (or severe weather events) on economic activity in a panel of 98 countries using local projection methods. Proxying the strength of an event by the monetary damages it caused, we find severe weather events to reduce the level of GDP. For most events in the EM-DAT data set the effects are small. The largest events in our sample (above the 90th percentile of damages) bring down the level of GDP by 0.5 percent for several years without recovery to trend. Smaller events (below the 90th percentile) see a less immediate decrease in initial years (0.1 ...