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Discussion Paper
Are Central Banks Moving Out of Dollar Assets?
The dollar’s share of global official foreign exchange reserves fell from 64 percent in 2015 to 56 percent in 2025. This downward trajectory is sometimes read as evidence that the dollar’s role in international financial markets is eroding. However, aggregate statistics obscure the composition of changes occurring at the country level. In this post, we show that the aggregate decline is not a systematic global shift away from dollar assets. Rather, the aggregate decline reflects the actions of a handful of large reserve holders, changing either their currency preferences or the size of ...
Report
Losses from Natural Disasters: New County-Level Data and Resilient Consumer Spending
We introduce Losses from Natural Disasters, the first comprehensive public dataset on county-level damages, injuries, and fatalities from U.S. natural disasters, and document new facts about consumer spending and household financial strain around extreme weather. We map NOAA meteorological zones to counties using geographic tools and data on population, housing, and economic activity. Using transaction and consumer credit data, we find that spending falls sharply when hurricanes and coastal disasters begin but recovers within a week, while the share of borrowers with high credit card ...