Search Results
Briefing
Can Trade Help Mitigate Risk From Weather Disruptions?
As weather-related disruptions become more frequent, firms face increasing risks to their supply chains. To safeguard against these shocks, businesses are adopting strategies to enhance resiliency and ensure that disruptions to key suppliers don't halt operations. In the 2024 working paper by several authors of this article (Juanma, Gaurav, Nicolas and Nitya), we explore how Indian firms mitigate risks from weather events by diversifying their input sources across multiple regions.Using detailed transaction data from Indian firms, we highlight multisourcing as a crucial risk-management ...
Journal Article
Extreme Weather and Financial Market Uncertainty
Extreme weather can have negative, minimal, or even positive effects on business performance—creating significant uncertainty about outcomes for those businesses. Financial markets show heightened uncertainty among investors for companies that have been hit by hurricanes. This uncertainty persists for several months after a hurricane’s landfall, as reflected by continued discussion of hurricanes in analyst calls. Comparing expected volatility to actual volatility shows that markets have underreacted to the uncertainty caused by hurricanes. After Hurricane Sandy, a particularly salient ...
Working Paper
Sellin' in the Rain: Weather, Climate, and Retail Sales
I apply a novel machine-learning based “weather index” method to daily store- level sales data for a national apparel and sporting goods brand to examine short-run responses to weather and long-run adaptation to climate. I find that even when considering potentially offsetting shifts of sales between outdoor and indoor stores, to the firm's website, or over time, weather has significant persistent effects on sales. This suggests that weather may increase sales volatility as more severe weather shocks be- come more frequent under climate change. Consistent with adaptation to climate, I ...
Working Paper
Clouded Judgment: The Role of Sentiment in Credit Origination
Using daily fluctuations in local sunshine as an instrument for sentiment, we study its effect on day-today decisions of lower-level financial officers. Positive sentiment is associated with higher credit approvals, and negative sentiment has the opposite effect of a larger magnitude. These effects are stronger when financial decisions require more discretion, when reviews are less automated, and when capital constraints are less binding. The variation in approval rates affects ex-post financial performance and produces significant real effects. Our analysis of the economic channels suggests ...
Journal Article
Climate Risk and the Fed: Preparing for an Uncertain Certainty
While the severity and scope of a changing climate remains unclear, the consensus is that it poses a significant risk to the global economy and financial system. As monetary policymakers, the Fed’s job is to navigate this uncertainty by anticipating the potential changes and understanding their implications.
Working Paper
Sellin’ in the Rain: Adaptation to Weather and Climate in the Retail Sector
Using novel methodology and proprietary daily store-level sporting goods and apparel brand data, I find that, consistent with long-run adaptation to climate, sales sensitivity to weather declines with historical norms and variability of weather. Short-run adaptation to weather shocks is dominated by changes in what people buy and how they buy it, with little intertemporal substitution. Over four weeks, a one-standard deviation one-day weather shock shifts sales by about 10 percent. While switching between indoor and outdoor stores offsets a small portion of contemporaneous responses to ...
Working Paper
Weather-adjusting employment data
First version: December 18, 2014. This version: January 12, 2015. This paper proposes and implements a statistical methodology for adjusting employment data for the effects of deviation in weather from seasonal norms. This is distinct from seasonal adjustment, which only controls for the normal variation in weather across the year. Unusual weather can distort both the data and the seasonal factors. We control for both of these effects by integrating a weather adjustment step in the seasonal adjustment process. We use several indicators of weather, including temperature, snowfall and ...
Working Paper
Estimating National Weather Effects from the Ground Up
Understanding the effects of weather on macroeconomic data is critically important, but it is hampered by limited time series observations. Utilizing geographically granular panel data leverages greater observations but introduces a “missing intercept” problem: “global” (e.g., nationwide spillovers and GE) effects are absorbed by time fixed effects. Standard solutions are infeasible when the number of global regressors is large. To overcome these problems and estimate granular, global, and total weather effects, we implement a two-step approach utilizing machine learning techniques. ...
Working Paper
It's Good Weather for More Government: The Effect of Weather on Fiscal Policy
I show that weather conditions on election day affect future fiscal policy. When it rains during state elections, there is an increase in the relative income of voters, which is followed by an increase in expenditure and debt. The increase in expenditure is directed towards a larger police and safety budget. This result is compatible with a model of complementarity between consumption and public goods. In the model, high-income voters support an increase in safety budget because they benefit more from it than low-income voters.
Report
The Effects of Weather on Massachusetts Municipal Expenditures: Implications of Climate Change for Local Governments in New England
In New England, municipal governments provide a variety of public services that are vital to residents and businesses, such as public works, police and fire services, and general government administration. However, the region and its local governments face an increasing threat from climate change. As recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, New England states have become hotter and wetter and have experienced an increased number of extreme precipitation events since 1900. Rising temperatures and more frequent extreme precipitation events are projected for the region ...