Wind matters

When Petronella Wyatt worked at the Telegraph, the office got a call from her mother one morning: "I'm afraid Petsy can't come to work today. It's too windy."
Well it's not just La Wyatt who's affected by the wind. This new paper estimates that wind speed is "significantly negatively related to UK small cap equity returns." This corroborates evidence from New Zealand. High winds  depress people, making them reluctant to take on risk, so shares fall.
This is by no means the only role wind plays in economics. It seems to have contributed to the rise of steam power; early steam ships were slower than clippers, but less vulnerable to bad winds and so more reliable.
And the wind played a big role in the discovery and colonization of the Americas:

[Columbus] had studied the wind patterns of the Atlantic, noting that from the Canary Islands off the Atlantic coast of North Africa the winds (now called trades) mostly blow from east to west, while further north, on the coast of Portugal and northern Spain and France, the winds (now called prevailing westerlies) blow just as steadily from west to east. Therefore he could sail west with the trades and home with the westerlies, with the winds fair both ways. No other man of his time had thought of that.

More importantly, the wind affects football, as Gianluca Vialli shows in this book. He says here:

Wind, more than any other climatic factor, influences the development of a footballer. It seems basic and simplistic but it is an absolutely huge factor. And it is not just something that affects young players - it has an impact on how a team trains and therefore how it plays, even at professional level.

Perhaps, then, we should pay more attention to the role of wind in human affairs.

Comments

[Chris Williams]

More kites would lead to more stable markets, then. Does this volatility correlate with kite ownership?

[chris]

Dangerous things, kites:
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=307652007

[Bonapart O Cunasa]

You're missing one other one. The direction of the wind used to affect the discounting of commercial bills in the London market, as it affected the likelihood of ships being able to come up the Thames to dock. Hence the weather vane in the Court room of the Bank of England.

[Matt Munro]

Didn't the great storm of 1987 play some part in the stock market crash of the same year ? As in few dealers got to work , so few deals, prices go down, confidence collapses.