The impact of climatic disaster on corporate investment policy

Extreme weather events have been occurring in recent years with high frequency and resulting in enormous physical and monetary damages. There is a large strand of literature illustrating how past disaster experiences alter individuals’ behavioral decisions in the future, leading them to make inappropriate decisions. In view of this, the main topic of this research is to explore whether companies choose to pursue stability and low risk after experiencing catastrophes. By investigating the impact of 33 U.S. hurricanes and 4 tropical cyclones on U.S. public companies’ investment policies, the empirical results reveal that firms located in disaster regions reduce their investment and capital expenditures during the post-disaster period. We further implement several robustness tests regarding subsample analyses, the propensity-score matching sample, and excluding the impact associated with the 2008 global financial crisis. Evidence of the robustness tests remain consistent and conjecture that companies indeed are inclined to behave more conservatively after experiencing climatic disasters.