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Speech
Testimony on Exploring Financial Risks on Banking Posed by Climate Change
Testimony before the New York State Senate Committees on Banks, Finance, and Environmental Conservation (delivered via videoconference).
Working Paper
Climate Policy Transition Risk and the Macroeconomy
Uncertainty surrounding if the U.S. will implement a federal climate policy introduces risk into the decision to invest in long-lived capital assets, particularly those designed to use, or to replace fossil fuel. We develop a dynamic, general equilibrium model to quantify the macroeconomic impacts of this climate policy transition risk. The model incorporates beliefs over the likelihood that the government adopts a climate policy causing the economy to dynamically transition to a lower carbon steady state. We find that climate policy transition risk decreases carbon emissions today by causing ...
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 ...
Working Paper
The Effect of U.S. Climate Policy on Financial Markets: An Event Study of the Inflation Reduction Act
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) represents the largest climate policy action ever undertaken in the United States. Its legislative path was marked by two abrupt shifts as the likelihood of climate policy action fell to near zero and then rose to near certainty. We investigate equity price reactions to these two events, which represent major realizations of climate policy transition risk. Our results highlight the heterogeneous nature of climate policy risk exposure. We find sizable reactions that differ by industry as well as across firm-level measures of greenness such as ...
Speech
Climate Change and Risk Management in Bank Supervision
Remarks at Risks, Opportunities, and Investment in the Era of Climate Change, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts.
Report
Physical Climate Risk Factors and an Application to Measuring Insurers’ Climate Risk Exposure
We construct a novel physical risk factor by forming a portfolio of REITs, long on those with properties more exposed to climate risk and short on those less exposed. Combined with a transition risk factor, we assess the climate risk exposure of P&C and life insurance companies in the U.S. Insurers can be exposed to climate-related physical risk through their operations and transition risk through their $12 trillion of financial asset holdings. We estimate insurers’ dynamic physical and transition climate beta, i.e. their stock return sensitivity to the physical and transition risk factors. ...