Assessing and hedging the cost of unseasonal weather: Case of the apparel sector

Jean-Louis Bertrand, Xavier Brusset and Maxime Fortin

European Journal of Operational Research, 2015, vol. 244, issue 1, 261-276

Abstract: Retail activities are increasingly exposed to unseasonal weather causing lost sales and profits, as climate change is aggravating climate variability. Although research has provided insights into the role of weather on consumption, little is known about the precise relationship between weather and sales for strategic and financial decision-making. Using apparel as an illustration, for all seasons, we estimate the impact on sales caused by unexpected deviations of daily temperature from seasonal patterns. We apply Seasonal Trend decomposition using Loess to isolate changes in sales volumes. We use a linear regression to find the relationship between temperature and sales anomalies and construct the historical distribution to determine sales-at-risk due to unseasonal weather. We show how to use weather derivatives to offset the potential loss. Our contribution is twofold. We provide a new general method for managers to understand how their performance is weather-related. We lay out a blueprint for tailor-made weather derivatives to mitigate this risk.

Keywords: Weather sensitivity; Weather risk management; Decision making; Statistical model; Retail sales (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221715000326
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Assessing and hedging the cost of unseasonal weather: Case of the apparel sector (2015)
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:ejores:v:244:y:2015:i:1:p:261-276

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.01.012

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

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