The future of economic welfare
Abstract
This paper investigates the impact of hurricanes on household economic welfare under future climate change scenarios. To this end, we use small area estimation technique to simulate our measure of wel-fare, consumption, for census households with our calculated estimates for hurricane wind damages that capture the type of building material which matters for poverty classification. For future risk as-sessments, we use synthetic tracks to run a hurricane wind field model for the geographical locations where households reside and then rely on estimated welfare coefficients to calculate out probabilities to predict future household outcomes under five different general circulation model (GCM) climate change scenarios. The results are indicative of policy instruments needed to counteract the future risk of welfare reduction.