Snowblind: The importance of climate information for recreational real estate

Seasonal climate forecasting systems have made substantial gains in recent years. Since climate forecasting technologies are quite new, it is difficult to value them by studying the impacts of existing systems. In pursuing the research necessary to develop and refine these technologies it is worthwhile to know if they have any benefit before their implementation. In this manuscript I determine that there is robust pre-implementation evidence that new vegetation index forecasting technologies could provide non-zero benefits in ranchette markets in Arizona. The magnitudes of the benefits are subtle, but nontrivial when aggregated across the population. In addition, intriguing results for parameters introduced in order to control for confounding impacts are found, suggesting potential rents on information asymmetries.