Natural disasters as macroeconomic tail risks

Sulkhan Chavleishvili and Emanuel Moench

Journal of Econometrics, 2025, vol. 247, issue C

Abstract: We introduce quantile and moment impulse response functions for structural quantile vector autoregressive models. We use them to study how climate-related natural disasters affect the predictive distribution of output growth and inflation. Disasters strongly shift the forecast distribution particularly in the tails. They result in an initial sharp increase of the downside risk for growth, followed by a temporary rebound. Upside risk to inflation increases markedly for a few months and then subsides. As a result, natural disasters have a persistent impact on the conditional variance and skewness of macroeconomic aggregates which standard linear models estimating conditional mean dynamics fail to match. We perform a scenario analysis to evaluate the hypothetical effects of more frequent large disasters on the macroeconomy due to increased atmospheric carbon concentration. Our results indicate a substantially higher conditional volatility of growth and inflation as well as increased upside risk to inflation particularly in a scenario where only currently pledged climate policies are implemented.

Keywords: Quantile vector autoregression; Counterfactual distribution forecasts; Disaster scenario analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304407624002653
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:econom:v:247:y:2025:i:c:s0304407624002653

DOI: 10.1016/j.jeconom.2024.105914

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Econometrics is currently edited by T. Amemiya, A. R. Gallant, J. F. Geweke, C. Hsiao and P. M. Robinson

More articles in Journal of Econometrics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().