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Discussion Paper
The Fourth SNB-FRB-BIS High-Level Conference on Global Risk, Uncertainty, and Volatility: Risk and Uncertainty in a Post-Pandemic World; Implications for the Economy, Financial Markets, and Monetary Policy
Over the past five years, the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain disruptions, concerns about trade policies and their implications for the global trading network, military conflicts, and broader geopolitical tensions have sharply heightened risk and uncertainty. U.S. and global Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) reached unprecedented levels in April 2025, mostly driven by uncertainty about trade policies (Figure 1).
Working Paper
Learning from History : Volatility and Financial Crises
We study the effects of volatility on financial crises by constructing a cross-country database spanning over 200 years. Volatility is not a significant predictor of crises whereas unusually high and low volatilities are. Low volatility is followed by credit build-ups, indicating that agents take more risk in periods of low financial risk consistent with Minsky hypothesis, and increasing the likelihood of a banking crisis. The impact is stronger when financial markets are more prominent and less regulated. Finally, both high and low volatilities make stock market crises more likely, while ...
Working Paper
Effects of Information Overload on Financial Markets: How Much Is Too Much?
Motivated by cognitive theories verifying that investors have limited capacity to process information, we study the effects of information overload on stock market dynamics. We construct an information overload index using textual analysis tools on daily data from The New York Times since 1885. We structure our empirical analysis around a discrete-time learning model, which links information overload with asset prices and trading volume when investors are attention constrained. We find that our index is associated with lower trading volume and predicts higher market returns for up to 18 ...
Working Paper
Climate-related Financial Stability Risks for the United States: Methods and Applications
This report has two objectives: 1. Review the available literature on Climate-Related Financial Stability Risks (CRFSRs) as it pertains to the United States. Specifically, the literature review considers several modeling approaches and aims to 1.1 Identify financial market vulnerabilities (e.g., bank leverage), 1.2 Provide an assessment of those vulnerabilities (high/medium/low) as identified by the current literature, and 1.3 Evaluate the uncertainty surrounding these assessments based on interpretation of the findings and coverage of existing literature (high/low). 2. Identify methodologies ...
Working Paper
Relative Liquidity and Future Volatility
The main contribution of this paper is to identify the strong predictive power of the relative concentration of depth provision, rather than volume of orders, over volatility. To this end, we propose a new measure, relative liquidity (RLIQ), which extracts information from a limit order book distribution and captures the level of consensus on a security's trading price. Higher liquidity provision farther away from the best quotes, relative to the rest of the book, is associated with a disagreement on the current price and followed by high volatility. The relationship is robust to the ...
Journal Article
Climate-Related Financial Stability Risks for the United States: Methods and Applications
The authors review ten broad classes of models that have been used to study potential financial stability risks arising from climate change in the United States. Their lens is primarily methodological: They describe each modeling technique, its advantages and disadvantages, and its key results. They find that statistical methods, based on reduced-form econometrics, are the most used tool, followed by general equilibrium models. While no approach in isolation addresses the complexity of climate-related financial stability risks, they discuss how existing techniques can be combined to inform ...
Discussion Paper
How global risk perceptions affect economic growth
The global crisis in 2008 reminded us of the importance of the financial sector for the macroeconomy, a lesson many had forgotten in the decades after the previous global crisis, the Great Depression. Financial risk matters. It is necessary for investment and growth, while also driving uncertainty, inefficiency, recessions, and crises.