Conference Agenda

It is long known that extreme weather becomes more prevalent with climate change and that household adaptation is an important mechanism to reduce damages thereof. However, cold stress events in the global north are often overlooked in this regard. I use a recent cold spell in Texas to analyze household adaptation behavior to extreme weather-induced electricity blackouts. In particular, I study (1) the extent to which households uptook adaptation measures, (2) if treatment spillovers occured. I employ an event study design to analyze the time-varying treatment effect of a simultaneous, one-off dosage treatment. The treatment is defined as exposure to the blackouts during the freeze event. As measure of adaptation I collected a novel type of granular data on installation permits for home electricity generators and rooftop-solar-battery-systems. I find a significant, robust, and time-varying response post-treatment both for home electricity generators and solar-battery-systems that peaks in quarter 3 after treatment. At this peak, the treatment effect of a 10 percentage point increase in outages constitutes 16.4 (8) additional, quarterly permits for generators (solar-battery-systems) per 10,000 households. Google Search data suggests that the public made a systematic association of the 2021 freeze event with climate change, which was not the case in earlier freeze events, and which were also not followed by a post-treatment response. This suggests that the recent response can indeed be interpreted as an adaptive response related to climate change impacts. I further find significant treatment spillovers, which are better explained by social connectedness than by distance, highlighting the role of salience. A heterogeneity analysis by socio-economic characteristics is in process.