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Discussion Paper
Does Corporate Hedging of Foreign Exchange Risk Affect Real Economic Activity?
Foreign exchange derivatives (FXD) are a key tool for firms to hedge FX risk and are particularly important for exporting or importing firms in emerging markets. This is because FX volatility can be quite high—up to 120 percent per annum for some emerging market currencies during stress episodes—yet the vast majority of international trades, almost 90 percent, are invoiced in U.S. dollars (USD) or euros (EUR). When such hedging instruments are in short supply, what happens to firms’ real economic activities? In this post, based on my related Staff Report, I use hand-collected FXD ...
Discussion Paper
Physical Climate Risk and Insurers
As the frequency and severity of natural disasters increase with climate change, insurance—the main tool for households and businesses to hedge natural disaster risks—becomes increasingly important. Can the insurance sector withstand the stress of climate change? To answer this question, it is necessary to first understand insurers’ exposure to physical climate risk, that is, risks coming from physical manifestations of climate change, such as natural disasters. In this post, based on our recent staff report, we construct a novel factor to measure the aggregate physical climate risk in ...
Report
Measuring the Climate Risk Exposure of Insurers
Insurance companies can be exposed to climate-related physical risk through their operations and to transition risk through their $12 trillion of financial asset holdings. We assess the climate risk exposure of property and casualty (P&C) and life insurance companies in the U.S. We construct a novel physical risk factor by forming a portfolio of P&C insurers’ stocks, with each insurer’s weight reflecting their operational exposure to states associated with high physical climate risk. We then estimate the dynamic physical climate beta, representing the stock return sensitivity of each ...
Report
CRISK: Measuring the Climate Risk Exposure of the Financial System
We develop a market-based methodology to assess banks’ resilience to climate-related risks and study the climate-related risk exposure of large global banks. We introduce a new measure, CRISK, which is the expected capital shortfall of a bank in a climate stress scenario. To estimate CRISK, we construct climate risk factors and dynamically measure banks’ stock return sensitivity (that is, climate beta) to the climate risk factor. We validate the climate risk factor empirically and the climate beta estimates by using granular data on large U.S. banks’ loan portfolios. The measure is ...
Discussion Paper
CRISK: Measuring the Climate Risk Exposure of the Financial System
A growing number of climate-related policies have been adopted globally in the past thirty years (see chart below). The risk to economic activity from changes in policies in response to climate risks, such as carbon taxes and green subsidies, is often referred to as transition risk. Transition risk can adversely affect the real economy through the banking sector. For example, a shock to borrowers’ transition risk can impair their ability to repay, which can then lead to an amplified effect on banks’ current and expected future profits, resulting in a systemic undercapitalization of banks. ...
Report
U.S. Banks’ Exposures to Climate Transition Risks
We build on the estimated sectoral effects of climate transition policies from the general equilibrium models of Jorgenson et al. (2018), Goulder and Hafstead (2018), and NGFS (2022a) to investigate U.S. banks’ exposures to transition risks. Our results show that while banks’ exposures are meaningful, they are manageable. Exposures vary by model and policy scenario with the largest estimates coming from the NGFS (2022a) disorderly transition scenario, where the average bank exposure reaches 9 percent as of 2022. Banks’ exposures increase with the stringency of a carbon tax policy but ...
Discussion Paper
Flood Risk and Firm Location Decisions in the Fed’s Second District
The intensity, duration, and frequency of flooding have increased over the past few decades. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 99 percent of U.S. counties have been impacted by a flooding event since 1999. As the frequency of flood events continues to increase, the number of people, buildings, and agriculture exposed to flood risk is only likely to grow. As a previous post points out, measuring the geographical accuracy of such risk is important and may impact bank lending. In this post, we focus on the distribution of flood risk within the Federal Reserve’s ...
Report
Climate Stress Testing
We explore the design of climate stress tests to assess and manage macroprudential risks from climate change in the financial sector. We review the climate stress scenarios currently employed by regulators, highlighting the need to (i) consider many transition risks as dynamic policy choices; (ii) better understand and incorporate feedback loops between climate change and the economy; and (iii) further explore “compound risk” scenarios in which climate risks co-occur with other risks. We discuss how the process of mapping climate stress scenarios into financial firm outcomes can ...
Discussion Paper
How Exposed Are U.S. Banks’ Loan Portfolios to Climate Transition Risks?
Much of the work on climate risk has focused on the physical effects of climate change, with less attention devoted to “transition risks” related to negative economic effects of enacting climate-related policies and phasing out high-emitting technologies. Further, most of the work in this area has measured transition risks using backward-looking metrics, such as carbon emissions, which does not allow us to compare how different policy options will affect the economy. In a recent Staff Report, we capitalize on a new measure to study the extent to which banks’ loan portfolios are exposed ...
Report
Real Consequences of Shocks to Intermediaries Supplying Corporate Hedging Instruments
I show that shocks to financial intermediaries that supply hedging instruments to corporations have real effects. I exploit a quasi-natural experiment in South Korea in 2010, where regulations required banks to hold enough capital for taking positions in foreign exchange derivatives (FXD). Using the variation in exposure to this regulation across banks, I find that the regulation caused a reduction in the supply of FXD, leading to a significant decline in exports for firms that held derivatives contracts with more exposed banks. These results indicate the crucial role of intermediaries in ...