Resilience After Climate Shocks: Evidence From SBA Disaster Loans

Federico Esposito and Saverio Simonelli

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: We show that natural disasters generate persistent declines in U.S. county employment and net job creation. We then examine whether emergency credit can mitigate these effects. Linking the universe of SBA disaster-loan applications to Census Bureau records, we exploit a credit-score screening rule introduced in 2016 and implement a fuzzy regression discontinuity design around the score cutoff. Firms just above the threshold are substantially more likely to receive government-backed loans, and approval increases employment relative to declined applicants, with effects persisting over subsequent years. The adjustment operates primarily through lower job destruction, while reduced firm exit and stronger job creation also contribute. Overall, SBA lending preserved an estimated 9.8% of the jobs that would otherwise have been lost in disaster-affected counties.

Keywords: Natural disasters; disaster lending; small business finance; employment; job flows; firm exit; regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 J21 J63 Q54 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2026/adrm/ces/CES-WP-26-58.pdf First version, 2026 (application/pdf)

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:cen:wpaper:26-58

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson ().