Capital Flows Financial Intermediation And Macroprudential Policies

This paper develops an open-economy DSGE model with an optimizing banking sector to assess the role of capital flows, macro-financial linkages, and macroprudential policies in emerging Asia. The key result is that macro-prudential measures can usefully complement monetary policy. Countercyclical macroprudential polices can help reduce macroeconomic volatility and enhance welfare. The results also demonstrate the importance of capital flows and financial stability for business cycle fluctuations as well as the role of supply side financial accelerator effects in the amplification and propagation of shocks.

Recent events, such as capital flow reversals and banking sector crises, have shaken faith in the widely held belief in the benefits of greater financial integration and financial deepening, which are typical in advanced economies. This book shows that emerging economies have often weathered the storm best despite the supposed burden of ‘weak institutions’. It demonstrates that a better policy framework requires reliable indicators of vulnerability to financial instability, as well as improved policy tools and automatic stabilizers that anticipate and limit the vulnerabilities to financial crises.

Macroprudential policies – caps on loan to value ratios, limits on credit growth and other balance sheets restrictions, (countercyclical) capital and reserve requirements and surcharges, and Pigouvian levies – have become part of the policy paradigm in emerging markets and advanced countries alike. But knowledge is still limited on these tools. Macroprudential policies ought to be motivated by market failures and externalities, but these can be hard to identify. They can also interact with various other policies, such as monetary and microprudential, raising coordination issues. Some countries, especially emerging markets, have used these tools and analyses suggest that some can reduce procyclicality and crisis risks. Yet, much remains to be studied, including tools’ costs ? by adversely affecting resource allocations; how to best adapt tools to country circumstances; and preferred institutional designs, including how to address political economy risks. As such, policy makers should move carefully in adopting tools.

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A guide to the latest theoretical developments in macroprudential policy, the newest tool in central banking policymaking circles.

We show that macroprudential regulation can considerably dampen the impact of global financial shocks on emerging markets. More specifically, a tighter level of regulation reduces the sensitivity of GDP growth to VIX movements and capital flow shocks. A broad set of macroprudential tools contribute to this result, including measures targeting bank capital and liquidity, foreign currency mismatches, and risky forms of credit. We also find that tighter macroprudential regulation allows monetary policy to respond more countercyclically to global financial shocks. This could be an important channel through which macroprudential regulation enhances macroeconomic stability. These findings on the benefits of macroprudential regulation are particularly notable since we do not find evidence that stricter capital controls provide similar gains.

The countercyclical capital buffer (CCB) was proposed by the Basel committee to increase the resilience of the banking sector to negative shocks. The interactions between banking sector losses and the real economy highlight the importance of building a capital buffer in periods when systemic risks are rising. Basel III introduces a framework for a time-varying capital buffer on top of the minimum capital requirement and another time-invariant buffer (the conservation buffer). The CCB aims to make banks more resilient against imbalances in credit markets and thereby enhance medium-term prospects of the economy—in good times when system-wide risks are growing, the regulators could impose the CCB which would help the banks to withstand losses in bad times.

In this paper we assess the effectiveness of macroprudential policies and capital controls in supporting financial stability. We construct a large and granular dataset on prudential and capital flow management measures covering 53 countries during 1996-2016. Conditional on a credit boom, we study the impact of these policy measures on the probability of the credit boom ending in a bust. Our analysis suggests that macroprudential tools are effective from this perspective. If credit booms are accompanied by capital flow surges, in addition to macroprudential tools, capital controls on money market instruments including cross-border interbank lending tend to contribute to reducing the likelihood of a credit bust.