IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/30445.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Is Physical Climate Risk Priced? Evidence from Regional Variation in Exposure to Heat Stress

Author

Listed:
  • Viral V. Acharya
  • Timothy Johnson
  • Suresh Sundaresan
  • Tuomas Tomunen

Abstract

We exploit regional variations in exposure to heat stress to study if physical climate risk is priced in municipal and corporate bonds as well as in equity markets. We find that local exposure to damages related to heat stress equaling 1% of GDP is associated with municipal bond yield spreads that are higher by around 15 basis points per annum (bps), the effect being larger for longer-term, revenue-only and lower-rated bonds, and arising mainly from the expected increase in energy expenditures and decrease in labor productivity. Among S&P 500 companies, one standard deviation increase in exposure to heat stress is associated with yield spreads that are higher by around 40 bps for sub-investment grade corporate bonds, with little effect for investment grade bond spreads, and with conditional expected returns on stocks that are higher by around 45 bps. These results are (i) observed robustly only starting in 2013–15, (ii) mostly absent for physical risks other than exposure to heat stress, and (iii) consistent with the class of macroeconomic models where climate change has a direct and large negative impact on aggregate consumption.

Suggested Citation

  • Viral V. Acharya & Timothy Johnson & Suresh Sundaresan & Tuomas Tomunen, 2022. "Is Physical Climate Risk Priced? Evidence from Regional Variation in Exposure to Heat Stress," NBER Working Papers 30445, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30445
    Note: AP CF
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w30445.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Egemen Eren & Floortje Merten & Niek Verhoeven, 2022. "Pricing of climate risks in financial markets: a summary of the literature," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 130.
    2. Jacopo Ponticelli & Qiping Xu & Stefan Zeume, 2023. "Temperature and Local Industry Concentration," Working Papers 23-51, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30445. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.