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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 ...
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 ...
Discussion Paper
What Do Climate Risk Indices Measure?
As interest in understanding the economic impacts of climate change grows, the climate economics and finance literature has developed a number of indices to quantify climate risks. Various approaches have been employed, utilizing firm-level emissions data, financial market data (from equity and derivatives markets), or textual data. Focusing on the latter approach, we conduct descriptive analyses of six text-based climate risk indices from published or well-cited papers. In this blog post, we highlight the differences and commonalities across these indices.
Report
Economics of Property Insurance
We study the economics of homeowners’ property insurance by examining how contract design balances the trade-off between incentive alignment and risk sharing. Using granular contract-level property insurance data merged with property-level disaster risk for millions of U.S. households, we develop and structurally estimate a model in which insurers optimally determine contract terms given property risk and household risk preferences. The estimates provide, to our knowledge, the first large-scale contract-level structural measures of risk aversion, risk premia, and the cost of moral hazard, ...
Report
Physical Climate Risk Factors and an Application to Measuring Insurers’ Climate Risk Exposure
We construct a novel physical risk factor using a portfolio of REITs, long on those with properties highly exposed to climate risk and short on those with less exposure. Combined with a transition risk factor, we assess U.S. insurers’ climate risk through operations and $13 trillion in asset holdings. Estimating dynamic climate betas, we find higher stock return sensitivity to the physical risk among insurers operating in riskier regions and to transition risk among those holding more brown assets. Using these betas, we calculate capital shortfalls under climate stress scenarios, offering ...
Report
Climate Stress Testing
We explore the design of climate stress tests to assess and manage macro-prudential 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 ...
Report
Credit Card Banking
Credit card interest rates currently average 22 percent, an 18 percent spread over the short rate. This spread far exceeds that on any other loan or bond, yet nearly half of households are credit card borrowers. Why are credit card rates so high? To understand this, and the economics of credit card banking, we use regulatory account-level data to analyze the lifetime cash flows of 550 million monthly accounts, representing 90 percent of the U.S. credit card market. While charge-off rates are comparatively high, averaging around 6 percent, they explain only a fraction of cards’ spread. ...
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. ...
Discussion Paper
What Millions of Homeowner’s Insurance Contracts Reveal About Risk Sharing
Housing is the largest component of assets held by households in the United States, totaling $48 trillion in 2025. When natural disasters strike, the resulting damage to homes can be large relative to households’ liquid savings. Homeowner’s insurance is the primary financial tool households use to protect themselves against property risk. Despite the economic importance of homeowner’s insurance, we know surprisingly little about how insurance contracts are actually designed with respect to property risk. In this post, which is based on our new paper, “Economics of Property ...
Report
U.S. Banks’ Exposures to Climate Transition Risks
We propose a new approach to estimate banks’ credit exposures to transition risks that combines sectoral effects of climate policies from general equilibrium (GE) models with historical information on loans’ default risks. At worst, estimated exposures reach 14 percent of bank loan portfolio values. Accounting for historic loan payoff structures reduces exposures to 0.5 percent–2 percent. Exposures can increase by 3–5 percentage points due to aggregate economic shocks. Analyses surrounding climate transition events suggest our estimates can serve as an upper bound on banks’ ...