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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 ...
Working Paper
Intermeeting Rate Cuts as a Response to Rare Disasters
This paper measures the probability of rare disasters by measuring the probability of the intermeeting federal funds rate cuts they provoke. Differentiating between months with Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings and months without identifies excess returns on federal funds futures averaging -1.5 bps per horizon month-ahead at short horizons, corresponding to a 3-5% per month risk-neutral probability of an intermeeting rate cut. The excess returns differ between months with and without meetings, suggesting a positive risk premium associated with meetings. The federal funds excess ...
Working Paper
Geopolitical Oil Price Risk and Economic Fluctuations
This paper studies the general equilibrium effects of time-varying geopolitical risk in the oil market by simultaneously modeling downside risk from disasters, oil storage and the endogenous determination of oil price and macroeconomic uncertainty in the global economy. Notwithstanding the attention geopolitical events in oil markets have attracted, we find that geopolitical oil price risk is not a major driver of global macroeconomic fluctuations. Even when allowing for the possibility of an unprecedented 20 percent drop in global oil production, it takes a large increase in the probability ...
Working Paper
Learning, Rare Disasters, and Asset Prices
In this paper, we examine how learning about disaster risk affects asset pricing in an endowment economy. We extend the literature on rare disasters by allowing for two sources of uncertainty: (1) the lack of historical data results in unknown parameters for the disaster process, and (2) the disaster takes time to unfold and is not directly observable. The model generates time variation in the risk premium through Bayesian updating of agents' beliefs regarding the likelihood and severity of disaster realization. The model accounts for the level and volatility of U.S. equity returns and ...
Working Paper
Geopolitical Oil Price Risk and Economic Fluctuations
This paper seeks to understand the general equilibrium effects of time-varying geopolitical risk in oil markets. Answering this question requires simultaneously modeling several features including macroeconomic disasters and geopolitically driven oil production disasters, oil storage and precautionary savings, and the endogenous determination of uncertainty about output and the price of oil. We find that oil price uncertainty tends to be driven by macroeconomic uncertainty. Shifts in the probability of a geopolitically driven major oil supply disruption have meaningful effects on the price of ...