The theory about the impacts of natural disasters on firms is ambiguous and the empirical evidence on this topic is scarce, which hampers the design of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation policies. In this paper we identify the short-run impacts of storms and floods on firm growth in labor, capital, and sales, using Enterprise Census data (2000–2014) for Vietnam. We define storms and floods with three different disaster measures: physical intensities, number of deaths, and economic damage. The performance of these disaster measures is compared by estimating dynamic growth models using the Blundell–Bond system generalized method of moments. We find evidence that flooding increases labor growth and capital growth but reduces sales growth significantly up to 3 years after flooding. We also find some evidence of positive impacts on labor growth and capital growth but mostly negative impacts on sales growth for storms within 3 years after storms strike. The impacts of floods and storms on firm growth are more pronounced and persistent for small and medium sized firms. Finally, unlike at the macro level, the direction and scale of disaster impacts found at the firm level are fairly consistent across the three disaster measures.

关于自然灾害对企业的影响的理论是模棱两可的，关于这一主题的经验证据很少，这阻碍了减少灾害风险和适应气候变化政策的设计。在本文中，我们使用越南的企业普查数据（2000-2014年），确定了风暴和洪水对劳动力，资本和销售的公司增长的短期影响。我们用三种不同的灾害量度来定义风暴和洪水：物理强度，死亡人数和经济损失。通过使用Blundell-Bond系统广义矩量法估算动态增长模型，比较了这些灾难措施的性能。我们发现有证据表明，洪灾可以提高劳动力增长和资本增长，但在洪灾发生后长达3年的时间里，销售增长会显着下降。我们还发现了一些证据，表明在风暴袭击后的三年内，风暴对劳动力增长和资本增长产生了积极影响，但对风暴的销售增长产生了消极影响。洪水和风暴对企业成长的影响对于中小型企业更为明显和持久。最后，与宏观层面不同，在企业层面上发现的灾难影响的方向和范围在三种灾难衡量标准中是相当一致的。