Boris Hofmann

The Determinants of Private Sector Credit in Industrialised Countries: Do Property Prices Matter?

Episodes of boom and bust in credit markets have often coincided with cycles in economic activity and property markets. The coincidence of these cycles has already been widely documented in the literature, but few studies address the issue in a formal way. In this study we analyse the determinants of credit to the private non-bank sector in 16 industrialised countries since 1980 based on a cointegrating VAR. Cointegration tests suggest that the long-run development of credit cannot be explained by standard credit demand factors. But once real property prices, measured as a weighted average of real residential and real commercial property prices, are added to the system, we are able to identify long-run relationships linking real credit positively to real GDP and real property prices and negatively to the real interest rate. These long-run relationships may be interpreted as long-run extended credit demand relationships, but we may also capture effects on credit supply. Impulse response analysis based on a standard Cholesky decomposition reveals that there is significant two-way dynamic interaction between bank credit and property prices. We also find that innovations to the short-term real interest rate have a strong and significant negative effect on bank credit, GDP and property prices.

Bank Lending and Property Prices: Some International Evidence

This paper analyses the patterns of dynamic interaction between bank lending and property prices based on a sample of 20 countries using both time series and panel data techniques. Long-run causality appears to go from property prices to bank lending. This finding suggests that property price cycles, reflecting changing beliefs about future economic prospects, drive credit cycles, rather than excessive bank lending being the cause of property price bubbles. There is also evidence of short-run causality going in both directions, implying that a mutually reinforcing element in past boom-bust cycles in credit and property markets cannot be ruled out.

Monetary Policy, Housing Booms and Financial (Im)Balances

This paper uses a factor-augmented vector autoregressive model (FAVAR) estimated on U.S. data in order to analyze monetary transmission via private sector balance sheets, credit risk spreads and asset markets in an integrated setup and to explore the role of monetary policy in the three imbalances that were observed prior to the global financial crisis: high house price inflation, strong private debt growth and low credit risk spreads. The results suggest that (i) monetary policy shocks have a highly significant and persistent effect on house prices, real estate wealth and private sector debt as well as a strong short-lived effect on risk spreads in the money and mortgage markets; (ii) monetary policy shocks have contributed discernibly, but at a late stage to the unsustainable developments in house and credit markets that were observable between 2001 and 2006; (iii) financial shocks have influenced the path of policy rates prior to the crisis, and the feedback effects of financial shocks via lower policy rates on property and credit markets are found to have probably been considerable.

Default, Credit Growth, and Asset Prices

This paper uses a Merton-type estimate of the probability of default (PoD) for the main banks in a sample of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and middle-income countries as a proxy for the fragility of their banking systems. Based on theory and stylized facts, the paper explores a range of financial and real variables that explain such PoDs across time. We find property price fluctuations and bank credit to be important explanatory factors. There is two-way interaction between these variables and a clearer relationship when the variables are entered as a deviation from trend. The lag structure between such developments and PoDs is long and varies widely across countries. The paper assesses the implications of these findings for economic policy.

Deflation, Credit and Asset Prices

The experience of historical episodes of financial crises in the late 19th and early 20th century, and also more recent episodes of boom and bust cycles in credit markets suggest that the build up of financial imbalances is reflected in asset prices, especially property prices, rather than in consumer prices. Based on a simple VAR impulse response analysis for a sample of twelve countries we assess the nature of the close empirical correlation between bank lending and asset prices. The results suggest that innovations to property prices have a significant effect on bank lending in the large majority of countries. For most countries we do not find evidence of a significant effect of credit on property prices or of significant dynamic interaction between share prices and credit in either direction. Interest rate innovations are found to have a significantly negative effect on asset prices in some countries, while bank lending is in general found to be rather unresponsive to interest rate movements. This finding suggests that the usefulness of interest rate policy as an instrument to smooth boom-bust cycles in asset and credit markets is questionable.

Gauging the Effectiveness of Quantitative Forward Guidance: Evidence from Three Inflation Targeters

This paper conducts a comparative analysis of the performances of the forward guidance strategies adopted by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Norges Bank and the Riksbank, with the aim to gauge whether forward guidance via publication of an own interest rate path enhances a central bank’s ability to steer market expectations. Two main results emerge. First, we find evidence that all three central banks have been highly predictable in their monetary policy decisions and that long-term inflation expectations have been well anchored in the three economies, irrespective of whether forward guidance involved publication of an own interest rate path or not. Second, for New Zealand, we find weak evidence that a publication of a path could potentially enhance a central bank’s leverage on the medium term structure of interest rates. JEL Classification: E40, E43, E52

Macroeconomic Fluctuations and Bank Lending: Evidence for Germany and the Euro Area

Abstract This paper analyzes the dynamic response of loans to the private sector and of economic activity to aggregate supply, demand and monetary policy shocks in Germany and the euro area based on a standard macroeconomic VAR using sign restrictions to identify the structural shocks. The main results of this analysis are that (i) with the exception of the response to the supply shock in Germany, the response of loans to the three macroeconomic shocks is rather weak and in most cases insignificant; (ii) the 2000-05 credit slowdown and weak economic performance in Germany were primarily driven by adverse supply shocks; and (iii) the marked slowdown in credit creation in Germany over this period actually represents a realignment of the outstanding stock of loans with its deterministic level. In order to assess the role of bank lending in the transmission of macroeconomic shocks, we further perform counterfactual simulations and analyze the dynamic responses of German loan subaggregates in order to test the distributional implications of potential credit market frictions. These exercises do not indicate that credit market frictions play an amplifying role in the transmission of macroeconomic fluctuations.

Monetary Policy Reaction Functions: ECB versus Bundesbank

We estimate monetary policy reaction functions for the Bundesbank (1979:4-1998:12) and the European Central Bank (1999:1-2003:7). The Bundesbank regime can be characterised, both before and after German reunification, by an inflation weight of 1.2 and an output weight of 0.4. The estimates for the ECB are 1.2, and 1, respectively. Thus, the ECB, while reacting similarly to expected inflation, puts significantly more weight on stabilising the business cycle than the Bundesbank did.