The Impact of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma on Business Establishments: A GIS Approach
August 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-23
Abstract
We use Geographic Information System tools to develop estimates of the economic impact of disaster events such as Hurricane Katrina. Our methodology relies on mapping establishments from the Census Bureau's Business Register into damage zones defined by remote sensing information provided by FEMA. The identification of damaged establishments by precisely locating them on a map provides a far more accurate characterization of affected businesses than those typically reported from readily available county level data. The need for prompt estimates is critical since they are more valuable the sooner they are released after a catastrophic event. Our methodology is based on pre-storm data. Therefore, estimates can be made available very quickly to inform the public as well as policy makers. Robustness tests using data from after the storms indicate our GIS estimates, while much smaller than those based on publicly available county-level data, still overstate actual observed losses. We discuss ways to refine and augment the GIS approach to provide even more accurate estimates of the impact of disasters on businesses.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
estimating,
data,
agency,
impact,
geography,
coverage,
geographic,
disaster,
hurricane
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Annual Survey of Manufactures,
Internal Revenue Service,
Center for Economic Studies,
Bureau of Economic Analysis,
Journal of Economic Literature,
Economic Census,
Geographic Information Systems,
North American Industry Classification System,
Census Bureau Business Register,
Business Register,
Probability Density Function
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'The Impact of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma on Business Establishments: A GIS Approach' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperStorms and Jobs: The Effect of Hurricanes on Individuals' Employment and Earnings over the Long Term*
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-21R
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, destroying homes and businesses and causing mass evacuations. The economic effects of disasters are often studied at a regional level, but little is known about the responsiveness of individuals' employment and earnings to the damages, disruption, and rebuilding'particularly in the longer run. Our analysis is based on data that tracks workers over nine years, including seven years after the storms. We estimate models that compare the evolution of earnings for workers who resided in a storm-affected area with those who resided in a suitable control counties. We find that, on average, the storms reduced the earnings of affected individuals during the first year after the storm. These losses reflect various aspects of the short-run disruption caused by the hurricanes, including job separations, migration to other areas, and business contractions. Starting in the third year after the storms, however, we find that the earnings of affected individuals outpaced the earnings of individuals in the control sample. We provide evidence that the long-term earnings gains were the result of wage growth in the affected areas relative to the control areas, due to reduced labor supply and increased labor demand, especially in sectors related to rebuilding. Despite the short-term earnings losses, we find a net increase in average quarterly earnings among affected individuals over the entire post-storm period. However, those who worked in sectors closely tied to tourism or the size of the local population experienced net earnings losses.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperA Shore Thing: Post-Hurricane Outcomes for Businesses in Coastal Areas
September 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-27
During the twenty-first century, hurricanes, heavy storms, and flooding have affected many areas in the United States. Natural disasters and climate change can cause property damage and could have an impact on a variety of business outcomes. This paper builds upon existing research and literature that analyzes the impact of natural disasters on businesses. Specifically, we look at the differential effect of eight hurricanes during the period 2000-2009 on establishments in coastal counties relative to establishments in coastal-adjacent or inland counties. Our outcomes of interest include establishment employment and death. We find that following a hurricane event, establishments located in a coastal county have lower employment and increased probability of death relative to establishments in non-coastal counties.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperTAKEN BY STORM: BUSINESS SURVIVAL IN THE AFTERMATH OF HURRICANE KATRINA
April 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-20
We use Hurricane Katrina's damage to the Mississippi coast in 2005 as a natural experiment to study business survival in the aftermath of a cost shock. We find that damaged establishments that returned to operation were more resilient than those that had never been damaged. This effect is particularly strong for establishments belonging to younger and smaller rms. The effect of damage on establishments in older and larger chains was more limited, and they were subsequently less resilient having survived the damage. These selection effects persist up to five years after the initial shock. We interpret these findings as evidence that the effect of the shock is tied to the presence of financial and other constraints.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperCombining Rules and Discretion in Economic Development Policy: Evidence on the Impacts of the California Competes Tax Credit
June 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-13
We evaluate the effects of one of a new generation of economic development programs, the California Competes Tax Credit (CCTC), on local job creation. Incorporating perceived best practices from previous initiatives, the CCTC combines explicit eligibility thresholds with some discretion on the part of program officials to select tax credit recipients. The structure and implementation of the program facilitates rigorous evaluation. We exploit detailed data on accepted and rejected applicants to the CCTC, including information on scoring of applicants with regard to program goals and funding decisions, together with restricted access American Community Survey (ACS) data on local economic conditions. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that each CCTC-incentivized job in a census tract increases the number of individuals working in that tract by over two ' a significant local multiplier. We also explore the program's distributional implications and impacts by industry. We find that CCTC awards increase employment among workers residing in both high income and low income communities, and that the local multipliers are larger for non-manufacturing awards than for manufacturing awards.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Impacts of Opportunity Zones on Zone Residents
June 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-12
Created by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, the Opportunity Zone program was designed to encourage investment in distressed communities across the U.S. We examine the early impacts of the Opportunity Zone program on residents of targeted areas. We leverage restricted-access microdata from the American Community Survey and employ difference-in-differences and matching approaches to estimate causal reduced-form effects of the program. Our results point to modest, if any, positive effects of the Opportunity Zone program on the employment, earnings, or poverty of zone residents.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDo SBA Loans Create Jobs? Estimates from Universal Panel Data and Longitudinal Matching Methods
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-27
This pape reports estimates of the effects of the Small Business Administration (SBA) 7(a) and 504 loan programs on employment. The database links a complete list of all SBA loans in these programs to universal data on all employers in the U.S. economy from 1976 to 2010. Our method is to estimate firm fixed effect regressions using matched control groups for the SBA loan recipients we have constructed by matching exactly on firm age, industry, year, and pre-loan size, plus kernel-based matching on propensity scores estimated as a function of four years of employment history and other variables. The results imply positive average effects on loan recipient employment of about 25 percent or 3 jobs at the mean. Including loan amount, we find little or no impact of loan receipt per se, but an increase of about 5.4 jobs for each million dollars of loans. When focusing on loan recipients and control firms located in high-growth counties (average growth of 22 percent), places where most small firms should have excellent growth potential, we find similar effects, implying that the estimates are not driven by differential demand conditions across firms. Results are also similar regardless of distance of control from recipient firms, suggesting only a very small role for displacement effects. In all these cases, the results pass a "pre-program" specification test, where controls and treated firms look similar in the pre-loan period. Other specifications, such as those using only matching or only regression imply somewhat higher effects, but they fail the pre-program test.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperMeasuring the Electronic Economy: Current Status and Next Steps
June 2000
Working Paper Number:
CES-00-10
The recent growth of consumer retailing over the Internet draws attention to the electronic economy. However, businesses also conduct other business processes over computer networks, and many have been doing so for some time. Uses of computer networks attract attention because of assertions that they lead to new products and services, new delivery methods, streamlined or re-engineered business processes, new business structures, and enhanced business performance. These changes, in turn, potentially affect the performance of the entire economy, including economic growth, productivity, prices, employment, trade, and the structures of businesses, regions, and markets. Evaluating these assertions, and their effects on economic performance, requires solid statistical information about the electronic economy. This paper develops principles for identifying information critical to measuring the size and evaluating the potential effects of the electronic economy, relates that information to current data collection programs, and notes relevant measurement issues. Some of the required information about the electronic economy can be collected by adding questions to existing surveys, making the scope of existing surveys consistent, or developing new surveys. However, many key pieces of information pose significant challenges to economic measurement. While some of those challenges are specific to the electronic economy, others are long-standing ones. Interest in the electronic economy highlights the importance of continuing attempts to address these challenges. Improving and enhancing the statistical system to provide information about the electronic economy, therefore, would also substantially improve the baseline information available for evaluating the performance of the entire economy.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperTHE IMPACT OF STATE URBAN ENTERPRISE ZONES ON BUSINESS OUTCOMES*
December 1998
Working Paper Number:
CES-98-20
Since the early 1980s, a vast majority of states have implemented enterprise zones. This paper examines the impact of zone programs in the urban areas of six states on business outcomes, the main target of zone incentives. The primary source of outcome data is the U.S. Bureau of Census' Longitudinal Research Database (LRD), which tracks manufacturing establishments over time. Matched sample and geographic comparison groups are created to measure of the impact of zone policy on employment, establishment, shipment, payroll, and capital spending outcomes. Consistent with previous research findings, the difference in difference estimates indicate that zones appears to have little impact on average. However, by exploiting the establishment-level data, the paper finds that zones have a positive impact on the outcomes of new establishments and a negative impact on the outcomes of previously existing establishments.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperInvestments under Risk: Evidence from Hurricane Strikes
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-43
We demonstrate that firms with plants in areas subject to a significant hurricane strike reduce their capital expenditures at the hurricane-affected plants and shift capital expenditures to plants in non-hurricane-affected areas. This effect is not present prior to 1997 and only appears from 1997 on. Our evidence is consistent with the possibility that a significant climate event such as the signing of the Kyoto Protocol raised the salience of the perceived risk from actual hurricane strikes and shifted firm behavior.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperHigh Frequency Business Dynamics in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic
March 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-06
Existing small businesses experienced very sharp declines in activity, business sentiment, and expectations early in the pandemic. While there has been some recovery since the early days of the pandemic, small businesses continued to exhibit indicators of negative growth, business sentiment, and expectations through the first week of January 2021. These findings are from a unique high frequency, real time survey of small employer businesses, the Census Bureau's Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS). Findings from the SBPS show substantial variation across sectors in the outcomes for small businesses. Small businesses in Accommodation and Food Services have been hit especially hard relative to those Finance and Insurance. However, even in Finance and Insurance small businesses exhibit indicators of negative growth, business sentiment, and expectations for all weeks from late April 2020 through the first week of 2021. While existing small businesses have fared poorly, after an initial decline, there has been a surge in new business applications based on the high frequency, real time Business Formation Statistics (BFS). Most of these applications are for likely nonemployers that are out of scope for the SBPS. However, there has also been a surge in new applications for likely employers. The surge in applications has been especially apparent in Retail Trade (and especially Non-store Retailers). We compare and contrast the patterns from these two new high frequency data products that provide novel insights into the distinct patterns of dynamics for existing small businesses relative to new business formations.View Full Paper PDF
