"Taken by Storm: Credit Constraints in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina," with Emek Basker, University of Missouri, Friday, September 16, 3:40 PM to 5 PM, 368A Heady Hall

Abstract: We apply difference-in-difference and triple-difference regressions to investigate business recovery in Louisiana and Mississippi three years after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and find evidence consistent with credit constraints in the immediate aftermath of the storms. Using various proxies for a firm's access to credit markets, including firm size, distance to the nearest bank, and demographic characteristics of the owner, we find that firms with lower access to credit disproportionately exited early and took longer to recover when damaged by the storms. These findings are robust to controlling for establishment productivity and hold despite the many government programs mobilized to help storm survivors.

Emek Basker is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, where she has taught since receiving her Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 2002. She has held visiting positions at the Federal Reserve Banks of St. Louis and Philadelphia and at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley, and was an ASA/NSF/Census Bureau Fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau. Her primary area of research is the economics of retail markets and the implications of recent trends in the retail sector, such as the growth of "big box" chains, on consumers, competitive conditions, and the supply chain. Her current work is on innovation and technology adoption by retail firms and on the impact of credit constraints on the retail sector.