Disasters Everywhere: The Costs of Business Cycles Reconsidered

Rare disaster models assume that growth is afflicted by a negative-mean and left-skewed component, which, if eliminated, could produce first-order welfare gains, unlike other models of business cycle costs. This paper introduces a new test to show that many if not most business cycles are asymmetric in this way, and resemble “mini-disasters” in addition to the widely studied rare disaster events with which we are familiar, typically wars. Using long-run historical data, we show empirically that this holds for advanced economies since 1870 in peacetime. We develop a tractable local projection framework to estimate consumption processes in normal and financial crisis recessions. Introducing random coefficient local projections, we get an easy and transparent mapping from estimates to a calibrated simulation model of disasters with variable severity. Our simulations show that substantial welfare costs arise from the smaller but more frequent mini-disasters. On average, even with low risk aversion, households would be willing to pay between 5 and 12% of deterministic consumption to avoid these events based on their average historical frequency and severity.