Reply to Bakkensen and Larson: Population may matter but does not alter conclusions

We report that for highly damaging hurricanes, not for less damaging hurricanes, name femininity predicts more fatalities (1). We suggest this may be because, for damaging storms, factors such as storm names that motivate protective action are more predictive of survival. Bakkensen and Larson (2) assert that our modeling suffers from endogeneity and lack of adjustment for population. The authors report reversed or no effect of hurricane names in models with completely different inputs. We show below that their approach and analyses are flawed, yielding incorrect conclusions. First, Bakkensen and Larson (2) provide no evidence for endogeneity bias in our models. Contrary to their assertion, a standard assessment for endogeneity as detailed in Hilbe (3) and Cameron and Trivedi (4) shows no bias at the level requiring adjustments (P > 0.10). (To test whether normalized damage is endogenous to fatalities, we built a simple original model in which …