Big News: Climate Change and the Business Cycle

DSpace Repository


Dateien:

URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10900/138652
http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:21-dspace-1386521
http://dx.doi.org/10.15496/publikation-80003
Dokumentart: Article
Date: 2023-03-21
Language: English
Faculty: 6 Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät
Department: Wirtschaftswissenschaften
DDC Classifikation: 330 - Economics
Keywords: Economics
Other Keywords:
Climate change
Disasters
Expectations
Survey
Monetary policy
Business Cycle
Natural rate of interest
Show full item record

Abstract:

News drive expectations about the economy’s future fundamentals. Climate change is big news: it will impact the economy profoundly but the effect will take some time to materialize in full. Climate-change expectations thus offer a unique opportunity to study the impact of news on the business cycle. We measure these expectations in a representative survey of US consumers. Respondents expect not much of an impact on GDP growth, but perceive a high probability of costly, rare disasters—suggesting they are salient of climate change. Furthermore, expectations vary systematically with socioeconomic characteristics, media consumption, various information treatments and over time. We calibrate a New Keynesian model with rare disasters to key results of the survey and find that shifts in climate change expectations operate like demand shocks and cause sizeable business cycle fluctuations.

This item appears in the following Collection(s)