Temperatures and cyclones strongly associated with economic production in the Caribbean and Central America

Abstract

Understanding the economic impact of surface temperatures is an important question for both economic development and climate change policy. This study shows that in 28 Caribbean-basin countries, the response of economic output to increased temperatures is structurally similar to the response of labor productivity to high temperatures, a mechanism omitted from economic models of future climate change. This similarity is demonstrated by isolating the direct influence of temperature from that of tropical cyclones, an important correlate. Notably, output losses occurring in nonagricultural production (–2.4%/+1 °C) substantially exceed losses occurring in agricultural production (–0.1%/+1 °C). Thus, these results suggest that current models of future climate change that focus on agricultural impacts but omit the response of workers to thermal stress may underestimate the global economic costs of climate change.

Military conflict and the rise of urban Europe

“…To compute spatial correlation-adjusted standard errors, we follow the routine in Fetzer (2014), who extends Hsiang (2010). We assume that spatial correlation linearly decreases in the distance between each sample city up to cutoffs of 100 km, 200 km, 300 km, 400 km, or 500 km, respectively.…”

Urban renewal after the Berlin Wall: a place-based policy evaluation

“…Using varying distance cutoffs, we calculate standard errors corrected for spatial autocorrelation, serial correlation and heteroscedasticity adapted for panel data as in Hsiang (2010). Table A7 displays the point estimates from the OLS regression as in Table 1 (column (5)) in the main paper, the clustered standard errors (column (1)), and the HAC corrected standard errors for various distance cutoffs (columns (2) to (7)).…”

Climate, conflict, and social stability: what does the evidence say?

“…In general, the climatic events that increase the risk of conflict are similar to the events that would have an adverse effect on agriculture (Schlenker and Roberts 2009;Lobell and Burke 2010) or human productivity (Hsiang 2010;Graff Zivin and Neidell 2013).…”