ETD

• climate change
• growth
• natural hazards
• storms
• wages

Ongoing climate change is likely to bring about an increase in the frequency and size of extreme weather events such as floods, hurricanes, and storms. Understanding the effects of these events on economic performance is key to policy making and the design of damage functions. In the present dissertation, I investigate the impact of damaging winds on wages, employment and income growth taking advantage of a panel dataset covering more than three hundred thousand events occurred in the US from 1991 to 2016. I find evidence of a significant negative effect of storm strength on all my macroeconomic variables, and no recovery in the long run. Results are robust to a variety of specifications. Further, I document that areas being relatively more exposed suffer a significantly stronger negative impact of damaging winds, suggesting that adaptation mechanisms do not intervene in determining the macroeconomic outcome of weather impacts. When breaking down our sample across different economic sectors, I find evidence of stronger effects in constructions and services-provision to firms. My results contradict the "build-back-better" hypothesis and suggest that also employment tend to fly away from affected counties, possibly deepening the impact to storms.