Campgrounds and climate change: An extreme weather event study for nature-based entrepreneurship

Abstract

Entrepreneurship researchers have focused primarily on climate change mitigation. The physical effects of climate and weather on venture performance remain understudied. Accordingly, we introduce climatology to the entrepreneurship literature to quantitatively investigate the impacts of extreme weather events (i.e., tropical stormforced winds) on nature-based entrepreneurial performance. We operationalize our extreme weather event study at three coastal, entrepreneurial campgrounds that observed 12 tropical storm-forced events between 2007 and 2016. When controlling for institutional and other fixed effects, there were short-term but no long-term performance disruptions. Findings suggest adaptive and mitigative capacities are possible among nature-based entrepreneurial ventures experiencing extreme weather events. Thus, a key insight is the resilience of RV campgrounds to tropical-storm forced winds, the focal weather extreme.