Hurricanes Revisited

There is little consensus in the economic literature on the effects of hurricanes on economic growth. This paper argues that this mixed evidence may result from ignoring the potential for hurricanes to generate heterogeneous impacts within countries. To test this hypothesis, we take advantage of highly disaggregated manufacturing export data over the period 1995-2005 to examine whether the effect of hurricanes on the pattern of trade depends on product-country-specific comparative advantage. Using a triple-difference identification strategy, we show evidence of heterogeneous effects: product lines with lower comparative advantage suffer disproportionately more.