Three essays on macroprudential policy

Abstract

This doctoral thesis gathers three studies on different aspects of macroprudential policy and financial stability. The research questions featured in each of its parts are to be seen as complementary: one chapter concentrates on mortgage credit markets, another one explores the business decisions of banking institutions, while the remaining one considers the potential international implications of borrower-based measures.The first paper introduces a simplified picture of the mortgage credit market and itsbehaviour under regulatory constraints related to borrower-based macroprudential policies. More precisely, the chapter presents an assessment of the effects of loan-to-value (LTV) ratiocaps for housing mortgages using an agent-based model. Sellers, buyers and banks interact within a computational framework that enables the application of LTV caps to a one-stephousing market. The initial exercise, which relies upon simulated distributions of buyers and sellers, is followed by a more realistic setup calibrated through actual European data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. In both cases, the application of an LTV cap results in a modified distribution of buyers along property values, bidding prices and properties sold, depending on the shape of the probability distributions of the LTV ratio, wealth and debt-to- income ratios considered. The results are of similar magnitude to other studies in the literature embodying other analytical approaches and suggest that this methodology can potentially be used to gauge the impact of common macroprudential measures...