Figure 1

Overview of study. Our causal inference procedure is composed of 3 steps. i) To measure the causal impact of the disaster on business i, we first identify a similar business j in another region which was not affected by the disaster. ii) We then predict the counterfactual (“what-if the disaster did not occur?”) visit count of i after the disaster timing using observed data from j. iii) We can quantify the causal impact of the disaster by taking the difference between the predicted and observed visit counts in i