In New England, temperatures are predicted to fall to as low as 20 degrees below zero around Boston and as low as 35 below zero in parts of Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire, the NWS said.

While the cold and snowy weather will have immediate effects of increasing fatalities and traffic accidents and throwing air travel into chaos, it is also likely to have significant–albeit temporary–impacts on the economy.

Conventional wisdom holds that weather has large effects on economic performance. Media reports often cite weather when signs of an economic slowdown show up. And executives at public companies are notorious for blaming unseasonable weather for worse-than-expected performance.

Another part of the conventional wisdom has it that the economy tends to “snap back” from weather effects. If extreme cold or snow holds back homebuilding, in one month, for example, those projects just get pushed off into warmer months. Hiring that gets delayed due to weather simply happens when it is not so terrible outside.

There is good reason for this economic folklore: it’s rooted in centuries, even eons, of human experience.

As Justin Bloesch and François Gourio, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, have written:

The idea that weather is an important source of fluctuations of production is an old theme in economics. A century ago, when the economy was still in large part driven by agriculture, bad crops had a measurable effect on aggregate income. Thus, the Dust Bowl had a notable effect during the Great Depression. Weather may continue to have a significant economic impact in countries that are very reliant on agriculture, either because they are poor or because their exports are concentrated on a small number of crops.

For most of human history, however, it was difficult to measure the effects of weather on the economy because we lacked reliable data on temperatures and even snowfall on a nationwide basis. But thanks to innovations in data processing and statistical analysis, we are getting a clearer picture of what changes in the mercury levels mean for our economy.

And as it turns out, the folklore mostly got it right.