The impact of natural disasters on the stock returns and volatilities of local firms

This paper examines the impact of major natural disasters on the stock returns and volatilities of U.S. firms. We find that a small proportion of catastrophes have a significant impact on returns, after controlling for false discoveries. The meaningful shocks are confined to firms based in disaster areas and are distributed over a relatively long period of time. The uttermost effects are felt in the two or three months following the peak of disaster news coverage. We observe that the second moments of local stock returns more than double when hurricanes, floods, winter storms and episodes of extreme temperature occur.