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Discussion Paper
How Do Natural Disasters Affect U.S. Small Business Owners?
Recent research has linked climate change and socioeconomic inequality (see here, here, and here). But what are the effects of climate change on small businesses, particularly those owned by people of color, which tend to be more resource-constrained and less resilient? In a series of two posts, we use the Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS) to document small businesses’ experiences with natural disasters and how these experiences differ based on the race and ethnicity of business owners. This first post shows that small firms owned by people of color sustain losses from ...
Discussion Paper
Small Business Recovery after Natural Disasters
The first post of this series found that small businesses owned by people of color are particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. In this post, we focus on the aftermath of disasters, and examine disparities in the ability of firms to reopen their businesses and access disaster relief. Our results indicate that Black-owned firms are more likely to remain closed for longer periods and face greater difficulties in obtaining the immediate relief needed to cope with a natural disaster.
Report
Investor Attention to Bank Risk During the Spring 2023 Bank Run
We examine how investors’ perception of bank balance sheet risk evolved before and during the March-April 2023 bank run. To do so, we estimate the covariance (“beta”) of bank excess stock returns with returns on factors constructed from long-short portfolios sorted on shares of uninsured deposits and unrealized losses on securities. We find that the market’s perception of bank risk shifted in both the time series and the cross-section. From January 2022 to February 2023, both factor betas were mostly insignificant, but after the bank run started, they became positive and significant ...
Discussion Paper
Are Nonbank Financial Institutions Systemic?
Recent events have heightened awareness of systemic risk stemming from nonbank financial sectors. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, liquidity demand from nonbank financial entities caused a “dash for cash” in financial markets that required government support. In this post, we provide a quantitative assessment of systemic risk in the nonbank sectors. Even though these sectors have heterogeneous business models, ranging from insurance to trading and asset management, we find that their systemic risk has common variation, and this commonality has increased over time. Moreover, ...