The Impact of Tropical Storms on Households: Evidence from Panel Data on Consumption
利用牙买加家庭面板数据，研究发现热带风暴平均使家庭人均消费下降约1.1%，但仅对居住在抗风性较差建筑中的家庭有显著影响，且家庭通过汇款、储蓄和调整非经常性支出来缓冲冲击。
Abstract This paper investigates the impact of tropical storms on Jamaican household consumption. We build a panel data set that follows individual households over time thus enabling us to take account of time invariant household and location unobservables that could be correlated with mean tropical storm exposure. Our results show that while the average damaging hurricane reduces per capita consumption by approximately 1.1%, more destructive events can cause losses multiple times this amount. There are, however, heterogeneous impacts across households, where only those that live in buildings with less wind resistant walls are affected. Additionally, we find that households are able to partially buffer the negative impact on consumption through remittances and savings, as well as by shifting funds away from non‐regular expenditures. Again, households differ in the nature of this buffering according to the wind resistance of their buildings.