Is it good to be bad or bad to be good?: Assessing the aggregate impact of abnormal weather on consumer spending

Boriss Siliverstovs and Anna Sandqvist

No 18-443, KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich

Abstract: Although the influence of exceptional weather on individual behaviour has already been acknowledgedin finance, psychology, and marketing, the literature examining weather effects at more aggregate levelis still limited. Further, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that weather anomalies affect consumerspending and retail business. The main aim of this analysis is to investigate and quantify the effectsof unusual weather in consumer spending at macro-level. Using aggregate retail sales data for Switzer-land, our findings reveal that weather deviations from seasonal norms, especially, unusually high or lowtemperatures in a given month, do cause sizeable intertemporal shifts in consumer spending at countrylevel. Furthermore, the effects of abnormal weather are found to differ across seasons, both with respectto sign and magnitude. In particular, our findings indicate that weather effects manifest mainly throughthe seasons change channel: weather conditions in line with the coming season boost the purchases earlyin the season.

Keywords: Consumer spending; intertemporal shifts; retail sales; unusual weather (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 D12 E21 E32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2018-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-mac
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https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000298425 (application/pdf)

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Journal Article: Is it good to be bad or bad to be good? Assessing the aggregate impact of abnormal weather on consumer spending (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kof:wpskof:18-443

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