Search Results
Working Paper
Geopolitical Risk and Global Banking
How 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 affiliatesâ unlike their response to other macro risks. Furthermore, banks reduce domestic lending when geopolitical risk rises abroad, especially when they operate foreign affiliates. A simple banking model in which geopolitical shocks feature expropriation risk can explain these ...
Working Paper
Scarred Consumption
We show that prior lifetime experiences can "scar" consumers. Consumers who have lived through times of high unemployment exhibit persistent pessimism about their future financial situation and spend significantly less, controlling for the standard life-cycle consumption factors, even though their actual future income is uncorrelated with past experiences. Due to their experience-induced frugality, scarred consumers build up more wealth. We use a stochastic lifecycle model to show that the negative relationship between past experiences and consumption cannot be generated by financial ...
Working Paper
Geopolitical Risk and Global Banking
How 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. Furthermore, banks reduce domestic lending when geopolitical risk rises abroad, especially when they operate foreign affiliates. A simple banking model in which geopolitical shocks feature expropriation risk can explain these ...
Report
How Firms’ Perceptions of Geopolitical Risk Affect Investment
Geopolitical risk has intensified in recent years, driven by events such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, escalating tensions between the United States and China, and conflicts in the Middle East. But how risky is the geopolitical landscape according to US firms? This brief presents a new index based on earnings call transcripts that reflects US firms’ perceptions of geopolitical risk and examines how those assessments affect their future investment, that is, their spending on long-term assets such as facilities, equipment, and technology.
Discussion Paper
Measuring Geopolitical Risk Exposure Across Industries: A Firm-Centered Approach
Business sentiment shapes real outcomes. Firms respond not only to hard data but also act on how they perceive risks and uncertainty. A growing literature shows that shifts in business sentiment can meaningfully affect investment, employment, and firm performance, even when fundamentals are unchanged.
Working Paper
Capital Flows, Asset Prices, and the Real Economy: A "China Shock" in the U.S. Real Estate Market
We study the effects of foreign real estate capital flows on local asset prices and employment using detailed housing transactions data. We document (i) a "China shock" in the U.S. real estate market after 2007 driven by the Chinese government's house purchase restrictions and (ii) "home bias" in foreign Chinese housing purchases in the United States as they are concentrated in ZIP codes historically populated by ethnic Chinese. Exploiting the quasi-random temporal and spatial variation of real estate capital inflows from China, we find that foreign Chinese housing purchases have a positive ...
Working Paper
Self-reinforcing Glass Ceilings
After the gender pay gap narrows, what labor choices do men and women make? Several factors contribute to the persistence of the pay gap, such as workplace flexibility, systemic discrimination, and career costs of family. We show that how the labor market responds to the narrowing of the gap is just as pivotal for understanding this persistence. When the gender pay gap declines in a specific sector, women are relatively more likely to seek jobs in that sector, while men readjust their search to less equitable sectors. These compositional effects decrease female participation in less equitable ...
Discussion Paper
How U.S. Bank Stock Prices Respond to Geopolitical Risk
Geopolitical risk has emerged as a central driver of global financial markets, with episodes such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine and recent conflicts in the Middle East triggering sharp movements in asset prices and increases in market volatility. But not all industries are exposed to such shocks in the same way (Caldara and Iacoviello 2022; Culver, Niepmann, and Shen 2025).
Report
How U.S. Bank Stock Prices Respond to Geopolitical Risk
Geopolitical risk has emerged as a central driver of global financial markets, with episodes such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and recent conflicts in the Middle East triggering sharp movements in asset prices and increases in market volatility. This brief examines how geopolitical risk affects U.S. bank valuations and which institutions are most vulnerable. Through cross-border lending, foreign subsidiaries, and trading activities, banks face multifaceted exposure to geopolitical risk that can affect their profitability via credit losses, disrupted funding markets, and altered fee ...
Working Paper
Global Banking and Firm Financing: A Double Adverse Selection Channel of International Transmission
This paper proposes a "double adverse selection channel" of international transmission. It shows, theoretically and empirically, that financial systems with both global and local banks exhibit double adverse selection in credit allocation across firms. Global (local) banks have a comparative advantage in extracting information on global (local) risk, and this double information asymmetry creates a segmented credit market where each bank lends to the worst firms in terms of the unobserved risk factor. Given a bank funding (e.g., monetary policy) shock, double adverse selection affects firm ...