IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32548.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Social Value of Hurricane Forecasts

Author

Listed:
  • Renato Molina
  • Ivan Rudik

Abstract

What is the impact and value of hurricane forecasts? We study this question using newly-collected data for the universe of land-falling US hurricanes between 2005–2022. We find that forecasts drive adaptive protective expenditures, and that erroneous under-forecasts result in a significant increase in total hurricane damage. Our main contribution is a new theoretically-grounded approach for estimating the marginal value of forecast improvements. We find that improvements since 2007, after the implementation of a national policy to improve hurricane forecasts, have reduced total costs by 19%, averaging $2 billion per hurricane. These benefits far exceed the annual budget of the policy, as well as for all federal weather forecasting.

Suggested Citation

  • Renato Molina & Ivan Rudik, 2024. "The Social Value of Hurricane Forecasts," NBER Working Papers 32548, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32548
    Note: EEE PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32548.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming
    • Q58 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Government Policy

    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:32548. 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.