Climate change and financial systemic risk: Evidence from US banks and insurers
研究了美国银行和保险业的系统性风险如何对气候灾难和绿色/棕色市场指数反应,发现极端事件加剧风险,绿色指数表现更好能降低风险。
We study the relationship between climate change and financial systemic risk. First, we test whether, to what extent and how quickly the systemic risk of US banking and insurance sectors reacts to billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. We prove that some extreme events can exacerbate financial systemic risk and provide insights about the different timing at which the reaction of the systemic risk measures takes place. Second, we investigate through quantile regressions how the performance of green and brown market indexes affects the systemic risk of the two US financial sectors. We observe that higher levels of the green indexes reduce systemic risk more than a raise in brown indexes, with an increasing magnitude in tail conditions. A raise in the riskiness of the green indexes seems to significantly increase systemic risk, with the effect being stronger than that of an increase in the riskiness of brown indexes. Our results confirm the importance of the adoption of appropriate policies aiming at contrasting the raise in the frequency and severity of climate disasters. Our findings are also important in the perspective of the likely increase (decrease) in the exposure of financial firms towards green (brown) companies, induced by the policy decisions taken to combat climate change, and in terms of the implications for banks’ and insurers’ risk management models and procedures.