温度不确定性对企业成长的影响：网格层次分析（英）2024

Policy Research Working Paper Impact of Temperature Uncertaintyon Firm Growth Jangho YangChristian Schoder Policy Research Working Paper1120 Abstract This study examines the impact of temperature uncertaintyon firm fixed capital growth using a unique dataset thatmerges extensive firm-level financial data with detailed grid-level weather data. The analysis reveals a strong negativerelationship between temperature uncertainty and fixed across industries with differing levels of investment irre-versibility and among countries with varying income levels.Firms in industries characterized by high investment irre-versibility and those operating in higher-income countries This paper is a product of the Development Policy Team, Development Economics. It is part of a larger effort by theWorld Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around theworld. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors maybe contacted at j634yang@uwaterloo.ca and cschoder@worldbank.org. A verified reproducibility package for this paper The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those ImpactofTemperatureUncertaintyonFirmGrowth:A JanghoYang∗1,2andChristianSchoder1ManagementSciences,FacultyofEngineering,UniversityofWaterloo2InstituteforNewEconomicThinking,UniversityofOxford3WorldBank Keywords:temperatureuncertainty,firms’fixedassetgrowth,investmentirreversibility,income- 1Introduction The effects of rising temperatures on economic activities have been extensively documented over thepast few years. While quantifying the socioeconomic impacts accurately has proven difficult (Tubiello& Rosenzweig 2008, Piontek et al. 2021), and results often contain substantial uncertainty, sometimes What is less understood is temperature variability, defined as the change in daily temperaturesover a given period, and its potential impact on economic activities.2Unlike the clear evidence ofrising global temperatures, there is no general consensus on global trends in temperature variability(Huntingford et al. 2013, Olonscheck et al. 2021).Although some studies suggest a global increase(Alessandri & Mumtaz 2022), changes in temperature variability are highly region-specific, with recent To examine the cross-industry, economy-wide effects of temperature changes, this paper focusesontemperature uncertainty—theunexpectedfluctuations in temperature that deviate from expected pat-terns. Our main interest lies in understanding how location-specific temperature uncertainty, as partof the broader uncertainties faced by economic agents, influences overall economic behavior across in-dustries. We focus on firm-level activities, particularly investment patterns (measured by fixed asset Building on ROT, this study aims to evaluate whether increased temperature uncertainty is associ-ated with slower firm growth across diverse geographical regions. Importantly, we investigate whetherthis adverse effect is more pronounced in sectors characterized by a higher proportion of irreversible as- To do this, we employ a unique dataset that merges firm-level financial data with meteorologicalinformation.Our analysis hinges on the concept of location-specific weather uncertainty for firms,measured via grid-level temperature uncertainty. We utilize financial records from the Orbis database,covering 30 million firms across 64 countries, alongside daily surface temperature data on a 1x1 gridfrom the Berkeley Earth Foundation dataset (BERKEARTH). The merging of these two datasets cre- Our analysis yields three key findings. First, there is a strong negative correlation between weatheruncertainty and firm growth. Our results indicate that for every one-degree increase in temperature un- Second, the impact of weather uncertainty on firm growth varies across industries with different de-grees of investment irreversibility. Industries with higher investment irreversibility experience a morepronounced negative impact on firm size growth. Doubling capital intensity intensifies the negative Third, the impact of weather uncertainty on firm growth varies across countries with different in-come levels. Higher-income countries are more adversely affected by weather uncertainties in terms of This paper is among the first to examine firms’ behavior in response to location-specific temper-ature uncertainty at the grid level. While climate-related uncertainty is often studied using indirect,non-weather measures like the Climate Change News Index (Engle et al. 2020) and in climate policy uncertaint