Search Results
Journal Article
How Are Businesses Responding to Climate Risk?
Understanding what kinds of climate-related risks businesses could face is part of the Federal Reserve’s work to support a thriving economy and well-functioning financial system. To advance these goals, the San Francisco Fed surveyed businesses in its nine-state region to learn how they perceive and approach climate risk. Findings show that businesses view a changing climate as a moderate risk to their activities, particularly through possible regulation changes, higher input costs, and variations in demand. Many businesses are adopting formal risk mitigation strategies, including ...
Discussion Paper
Moving Out of a Flood Zone? That May Be Risky!
An often-overlooked aspect of flood-plain mapping is the fact that these maps designate stark boundaries, with households falling either inside or outside of areas designated as “flood zones.” Households inside flood zones must insure themselves against the possibility of disasters. However, costly insurance may have pushed lower-income households out of areas officially designated a flood risk and into physically adjacent areas. While not designated an official flood risk, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and disaster data shows that these areas are still at considerable risk ...
Journal Article
Energy transition means more than just additional electric vehicles
Dallas Fed economist David Rapson discusses the challenges of moving away from a fossil-fuel-dependent economy.
Journal Article
Development bank funds border infrastructure to aid U.S.–Mexico trade
Calixto Mateos, former managing director of the North American Development Bank, discusses his work at the NADBank and its role enhancing trade.
Working Paper
Industrial Composition of Syndicated Loans and Banks’ Climate Commitments
In the past two decades, a number of banks joined global initiatives aimed to mitigate climate change by “greening” their asset portfolios. We study whether banks that made such commitments have a different emission exposure of their portfolios of syndicated loans than banks that did not. We rely on loan-level information with global coverage combined with country-industry information on emissions. We find that all banks have reduced their loan-emission exposures over the last 8 years. However, we do not find differences between banks that did and those that did not signal their ...
Dallas Fed, Latin American central banks explore financial stability risks
The COVID-19 pandemic, recent monetary tightening and a strengthening U.S. dollar were the themes explored during a recent conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the Center for Latin American Monetary Studies (CEMLA) and held at CEMLA’s Mexico City headquarters.
Report
Understanding the Linkages between Climate Change and Inequality in the United States
We conduct a review of the existing academic literature to outline possible links between climate change and inequality in the United States. First, researchers have shown that the impact of both physical and transition risks may be uneven across location, income, race, and age. This is driven by a region’s geography as well as its adaptation capabilities. Second, measures that individuals and governments take to adapt to climate change and transition to lower emissions risk increasing inequality. Finally, while federal aid and insurance coverage can mitigate the direct impact of physical ...
Discussion Paper
How Do Natural Disasters Affect Small Business Owners in the Fed’s Second District?
In this post, we follow up on the previous Liberty Street Economics post in this series by studying other impacts of extreme weather on the real sector. Data from the Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS) shed light on how small businesses in the Second District are impacted by natural disasters (such as hurricanes, floods, wildfires, droughts, and winter storms). Among our findings are that increasing shares of small business firms in the region sustain losses from natural disasters, with minority-owned firms suffering losses at a disproportionately higher rate than ...
Working Paper
Projecting the Impact of Rising Temperatures: The Role of Macroeconomic Dynamics
We use theory and empirics to distinguish between the impact of temperature on transition (temporary) and steady state (permanent) growth in output per capita. Standard economic theory suggests that the long-run growth rate of output per capita is determined entirely by the growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP). We find evidence suggesting that the level of temperature affects the level of TFP, but not the growth rate of TFP. This implies that a change in temperature will have a temporary, but not a permanent, impact on growth in output per capita. To highlight the quantitative ...
Journal Article
Addressing Texas grid reliability: Time to go nuclear?
Thirty years after Texas’ last nuclear plant opened, new nuclear generation could provide needed power without planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.