Financial institutions

FEDS Paper: Pricing Tail Risks: Bank Equity Returns During the 2023 Bank Stress

09/05/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Matthew P. Seay and Shawn M. KimbleDid bank equity prices reflect growing sector imbalances before the 2023 failure of Silicon Valley Bank? We find that banks with higher reliance on uninsured deposits, or with higher marked-to-market leverage, had lower equity returns prior to SVB's collapse. Although markets priced uninsured deposits and high leverage individually, their interaction was not reflected in market prices prior to SVB’s failure.

FEDS Paper: Central bank preparedness for market-functioning asset purchases as a consideration for long-run balance sheet composition

09/05/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Rochelle M. Edge and Dan LiThis paper proposes an approach to enhance the Federal Reserve's readiness to undertake market-functioning asset purchases during Treasury market disruptions.

IFDP Paper: De-Dollarization? Diversification? Exploring Central Bank Gold Purchases and the Dollar’s Role in International Reserves

09/05/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Colin WeissI examine how governments have managed their holdings of gold and dollar reserves in recent decades, a period when gold’s share of aggregate international reserves rose and the dollar’s share fell. Using data on central banks’ reserve currency composition and official sector purchases of U.S. assets, I argue that gold reserve accumulation is generally not associated with de-dollarization of international reserves at the country level, except in a few prominent cases.

FEDS Paper: Local Estimation for Option Pricing: Improving Forecasts with Market State Information

08/27/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Hyung Joo Kim and Dong Hwan OhWe propose a novel estimation framework for option pricing models that incorporates local, state-dependent information to improve out-of-sample forecasting performance.

IFDP Paper: Real Exchange Rate and Net Trade Dynamics: Financial and Trade Shocks

08/27/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Marcos Mac Mullen and Soo Kyung WooThis paper studies the drivers of the US real exchange rate (RER), with a particular focus on its comovement with net trade (NT) flows. We consider the entire spectrum of frequencies, as the low-frequency variation accounts for 62 and 64 percent of the unconditional variance of the RER and NT, respectively.

IFDP Paper: Geopolitical Risk and Global Banking

08/27/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Friederike Niepmann and Leslie Sheng ShenHow do banks respond to geopolitical risk, and is this response distinct from other macroeconomic risks? Using U.S. supervisory data and new geopolitical risk indices, we show that banks reduce cross-border lending to countries with elevated geopolitical risk but continue lending to those markets through foreign affiliates—unlike their response to other macro risks.

FEDS Paper: When Tails Are Heavy: The Benefits of Variance-Targeted, Non-Gaussian, Quasi-Maximum Likelihood Estimation of GARCH Models

08/27/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Todd PronoIn heavy-tailed cases, variance targeting the Student's-t estimator proposed in Bollerslev (1987) for the linear GARCH model is shown to be robust to density misspecification, just like the popular Quasi-Maximum Likelihood Estimator (QMLE). The resulting Variance-Targeted, Non-Gaussian, Quasi-Maximum Likelihood Estimator (VTNGQMLE) is shown to possess a stable limit, albeit one that is highly non-Gaussian, with an ill-defined variance.

IFDP Paper: Why are Manufacturing Plants Smaller in Developing Countries? Theory and Evidence from India

08/25/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Anil K. Jain and Siddharth KothariPoorer countries (and poorer states within India) have a larger share of manufacturing employment in small plants. This paper presents empirical evidence and a theoretical model to show that this relationship is driven by greater demand for lower quality goods in poorer regions, which can be produced efficiently in small plants. First, using data for India, we show that richer households buy higher price goods and larger plants produce higher price products.

From words to deeds – incorporating climate risks into sovereign credit ratings

07/29/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

We investigate the impact of climate risks on sovereign credit ratings worldwide. Our analysis shows that higher temperature anomalies and more frequent natural disasters – measures of physical risk – correlate with lower credit ratings. We find that long-term shifts in climate patterns (“chronic risk”) primarily affect advanced economies, while the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events (“acute risk”) matters more for emerging economies. However, the estimated impact of both types of risk on credit ratings is low and the economic effects are negligible.

Climate change, firms and aggregate productivity

06/24/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Our paper uses a general equilibrium framework to examine the effects of temperature on firm-level demand, productivity and input allocative efficiency. Using data from Italian firms and detailed climate data, it uncovers a sizeable negative effect of extreme temperatures on firm-level productivity. Based on these estimates, the model generates aggregate productivity losses from local temperature fluctuations that are higher than previously thought, ranging from 0.60% to 6.82% depending on the scenario and the extent of adaptation.

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