I estimate the impact of hurricane strikes on local economic growth rates. To this end, I assemble a panel data set of U.S. coastal counties' growth rates and construct a novel hurricane destruction index that is based on a monetary loss equation, local wind speed estimates derived from a physical wind field model, and local exposure characteristics. The econometric results suggest that a county's annual economic growth rate falls on average by 0.45 percentage points, 28%% of it due to richer individuals moving away from affected counties. I also find that the impact of hurricanes is netted out in annual terms at the state level and does not affect national economic growth rates at all. © 2011 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

We examine the role of rainfall trends in poor growth performance of sub-Saharan African nations relative to other developing countries, using a new cross-country panel climatic data set in an empirical economic growth framework. Our results show that rainfall has been a significant determinant of poor economic growth for African nations but not for other countries. Depending on the benchmark measure of potential rainfall, we estimate that the direct impact under the scenario of no decline in rainfall would have resulted in a reduction of between around 15% and 40% of today's gap in African GDP per capita relative to the rest of the developing world.

This paper investigates whether government support can act to increase exporting activity. We use a uniquely rich data set on Irish manufacturing plants and employ an empirical strategy that combines a nonparametric matching procedure with a difference-in-differences estimator in order to deal with the potential selection problem inherent in the analysis. Our results suggest that if grants are large enough, they can encourage already exporting firms to compete more effectively on the international market. However, there is little evidence that grants encourage nonexporters to start exporting.

Drought can tighten agricultural credit conditions precisely when adaptation investments and access to working capital are most valuable. Using bank balance-sheet data merged with county-level U.S. Drought Monitor data for 2000–2020, we show that local credit markets exposed to drought experience significant declines in agricultural lending, with effects concentrated in severe episodes. These declines are strongest in markets served by geographically concentrated banks, especially single-county institutions, and weaker where lenders are more geographically diversified. In addition, we show that counties with greater irrigation intensity experience smaller lending declines during extreme droughts, while drought-related contractions are concentrated in counties with lower baseline crop resistance. Lending responses are also larger in counties with prior drought experience, consistent with persistent climate risk shaping local credit conditions. Our evidence highlights how climate risk, local adaptation, and bank structure jointly determine the availability of agricultural credit during drought episodes.