Macroeconomics of climate risk
PhD candidate in economics, University of Antilles (CREDDI) · defending 2026
I study how climate shocks move through small open economies, through their public finances, their debt and their cost of capital, and what helps them recover. Few places show it more clearly than the Caribbean.
Reading the shock, and the recovery.
About
I'm a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Antilles, in the CREDDI research center, defending in 2026. I work on the macroeconomics of climate risk: how the large physical shocks that hit an economy turn into financial and fiscal ones. I focus on small open Caribbean economies, because they are struck often and hard, and because what happens there is unusually clear to see.
A hurricane does not stay physical. It raises the cost of borrowing abroad, strains public budgets and sovereign debt, and reshapes what households and governments decide to spend, tax and insure. I study these channels with structural macroeconomic models and applied empirical work, from how a single shock transmits across very different islands, to what fast disaster insurance is really worth to a government, to how global disruptions and local taxes pass through to the price of everyday goods.
I care about what the results mean in practice: where reconstruction effort pays off, how price and insurance schemes are designed, and how the cost of a shock can be shared rather than borne alone. And I try to explain all of it plainly, because the people it concerns most, in the Caribbean and beyond, should not need a doctorate to follow the argument. The work speaks both to macroeconomists and to the institutions that finance and insure climate risk.
Research
How cyclones, global supply disruptions and local taxes pass through to consumer prices in Guadeloupe, Martinique and Réunion. Includes the first quantitative evaluation of the Bouclier Qualité Prix.
A two-sector DSGE model calibrated to Jamaica, Dominica and the Bahamas. The same channels carry a hurricane through each economy; what changes across islands is their magnitude. And output falls more from the lost efficiency of the capital that survives than from the capital destroyed.
An integrative review of how disasters reshape households, sectors and states, mapping a fragmented literature into a single framework and setting out six research priorities.
Writing
Short pieces where I try to explain the ideas in my research in plain language. A few selected below; the full list is in the blog.
We praise the resilience of families after a hurricane. But behind that word lies a series of increasingly costly sacrifices.
Contact
carl.rippon@etu.univ-antilles.fr
Affiliation
CREDDI, University of Antilles
Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe