Natural Disaster Effects on Popular Sentiment Toward Finance

We use a text-based measure of popular sentiment toward finance to study how finance sentiment responds to rare historical disasters and to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Finance sentiment declines after epidemics and earthquakes but rises following severe droughts, floods, and landslides. These heterogeneous effects suggest finance sentiment responds differently to the realization of insured versus uninsured risks. Finance sentiment declines at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but recovers in countries that experienced high stock markets returns and that responded with large fiscal spending. Finance sentiment seems to depend on the insurance provided by private markets and by public finance.