Relationship Between Financial Markets and Natural Disasters in the US

The objective of this study is to find out how different sectors of the market, as defined by the Bloomberg Industry Classification Standard (BICS), react before and after different natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tornados. Public cross sectional and time series data from NOAA, Unisys Weather, and the USGS were collected, in order to build a data set that could be used for this study. OLS regressions, as well as fixed effects regressions were used to achieve the results. Among the major findings is a highly significant upward reaction in the returns of the energy sector when property damage from a tornado occurs