The Anatomy Of The Transmission Of Macroprudential Policies

We analyze how regulatory constraints on household leverage—in the form of loan-to-income and loan-to-value limits—a?ect residential mortgage credit and house prices as well as other asset classes not directly targeted by the limits. Supervisory loan level data suggest that mortgage credit is reallocated from low-to high-income borrowers and from urban to rural counties. This reallocation weakens the feedback loop between credit and house prices and slows down house price growth in “hot” housing markets. Consistent with constrained lenders adjusting their portfolio choice, more-a?ected banks drive this reallocation and substitute their risk-taking into holdings of securities and corporate credit.

The global financial crisis (GFC) underscored the need for additional policy tools to safeguard financial stability and ultimately macroeconomic stability. Systemic financial vulnerabilities had developed under a seemingly tranquil macroeconomic surface of low inflation and small output gaps. This challenged the precrisis view that achieving these traditional policy targets was a sufficient condition for macroeconomic stability. Thus, new tools had to be deployed to target specific financial vulnerabilities and to build buffers to cushion adverse aggregate shocks, while allowing traditional policy levers, including monetary and microprudential policies to focus on their traditional roles. Macroprudential policy measures emerged as the solution to this gap. Some of these measures had been used before the GFC (mostly in emerging markets). But it was only after the crisis that they were more widely adopted, and the toolkit expanded. This spurred a growing body of empirical research on the effects and potential shortfalls of these measures, with a further deepening of this knowledge gaining importance as policymakers confront increased financial stability risks in the post-pandemic world. Recognizing that there still is much to learn, this paper takes stock of our expanding understanding about the effects (and side effects) of macroprudential measures by focusing on these questions: What have we learned about the effects of macroprudential policy in containing the buildup of vulnerabilities? What do we know about the effects on economic activity and resilience? How do policy effects vary with conditions and over time? How important are leakages and circumvention? How do the effects on credit depend on other policies?

This paper builds a novel database on the effects of macroprudential policy drawing from 58 empirical studies, comprising over 6,000 results on a wide range of instruments and outcome variables. It encompasses information on statistical significance, standardized magnitudes, and other characteristics of the estimates. Using meta-analysis techniques, the paper estimates average effects to find i) statistically significant effects on credit, but with considerable heterogeneity across instruments; ii) weaker and more imprecise effects on house prices; iii) quantitatively stronger effects in emerging markets and among studies using micro-level data; and iii) statistically significant evidence of leakages and spillovers. Other findings include relatively stronger impacts for tightening than loosening actions and negative effects on economic activity in the near term.

Despite having introduced borrower-based measures (BBM), Lithuania's housing and mortgage markets were booming during the low-interest-rate period, casting doubt on the macroprudential toolkit's ability to contain excessive mortgage growth. This paper assesses the adequacy of BBMs’ parametrization in Lithuania. We do so by building a novel lifetime expected credit loss framework that is founded on actual loan-level default and household income data. We show that the BBM package effectively contains mortgage credit risk and that housing loans are more resilient to stress than in the preregulatory era. Our BBM limit calibration exercise reveals that (1) in the low-rate environment, income-based measures could have been tighter; and (2) borrowers taking out secondary mortgages rightly are and should be required to pledge a higher down payment.

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.

We explore the differential effects of lender-based macroprudential policies on new mortgage borrowing for households of different income using a comprehensive dataset that links macroprudential policy actions with household survey data for European Union countries. The main results suggest that higher-income households on average experience a larger reduction in mortgage loan size than lower-income households when regulation targeting total lenders’ assets tightens. In contrast, lower-income households on average experience a larger reduction in mortgage loan size than higher-income households when regulation targeting lenders’ capital requirements tightens. We also provide evidence of the different channels through which the differential effects operate.

Sector-specific macroprudential regulations increase the riskiness of credit to other sectors. Using firm-level data, this paper computed the measures of the riskiness of corporate credit allocation for 29 advanced and emerging economies. Consistently across these measures, the paper finds that during credit expansions, an unexpected tightening of household-specific macroprudential tools is followed by a rise in riskier corporate lending. Quantitatively, such unexpected tightening during a period of rapid credit growth increases the riskiness of corporate credit by around 10 percent of the historical standard deviation. This result supports early policy interventions when credit vulnerabilities are still low, since sectoral leakages will be less important at this stage. Further evidence from bank lending standards surveys suggests that the leakage effects are stronger for larger firms compared to SMEs, consistent with recent evidence on the use of personal real estate as loan collateral by small firms.

Since at least the Great Financial Crisis, authorities around the world have increasingly relied on macroprudential policy to help secure financial stability and complement monetary policy as an integral element of a broader macro-financial stability framework. In today's interconnected global financial system, policy actions taken by the major advanced economies can have spillovers on the rest of the world through their impact on capital flows and exchange rates, potentially generating vulnerabilities across borders. Conversely, in emerging market economies, macroprudential policy as well as foreign exchange intervention and/or capital flow management policy can help mitigate the corresponding impact. This can in turn generate spillbacks on advanced economies — spillbacks that have become more sizeable as the emerging market economies' heft in the world has grown. Yet little is known about these interactions.The contents of this book are based on a conference held on 26-28 May 2021 and jointly hosted by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). It aims to contribute to existing literature on macro-financial policymaking by providing an overall conceptual framework and documenting the latest global trends and country experiences. In particular, it highlights the role of international spillovers and spillbacks, paying particular attention to emerging market economies. This book is essential reading for academics, graduate students and economic professionals. It can also serve as a handbook for policymakers at central banks, regulatory authorities and other government agencies tasked with designing and implementing macroprudential or more generally macro-financial stability policies. The book will also be of interest to researchers at international organisations.