Deniz Igan

Credit Booms and Lending Standards: Evidence from the Subprime Mortgage Market

This paper studies the relationship between the recent boom and current delinquencies in the subprime mortgage market. Specifically, we analyze the extent to which this relationship can be explained by a decrease in lending standards that is unrelated to improvements in underlying economic fundamentals. We find evidence of a decrease in lending standards associated with substantial increases in the number of loan applications. We also find that the underlying market structure of the mortgage industry mattered, with larger declines in lending standards being associated with increases in the number of competing lenders. Finally, increased ability to securitize mortgages appears to have affected lender behaviour, with lending standards experiencing greater declines in areas with higher mortgage securitization rates. The results are consistent with theoretical predictions from recent financial accelerator models based on asymmetric information, and shed some light on the underlying causes and characteristics of the current crisis in the subprime mortgage market.

Policies for Macrofinancial Stability: How to Deal with Credit Booms?

This note explores the costs and benefits of different policy options to reduce the risks associated with credit booms, drawing upon several country experiences and the findings from econometric analysis.

Policies for Macrofinancial Stability : Options to Deal with Real Estate Booms

DISCLAIMER: This Staff Discussion Note represents the views of the authors and does not necessarily represent IMF views or IMF policy. The views expressed herein should be attributed to the authors and not to the IMF, its Executive Board, or its management. Staff Discussion Notes are published to elicit comments and to further debate.

The Dynamics of Product Quality and International Competitiveness

Despite the appreciation of the exchange rate, the eight Central and Eastern European countries (the CEE-8) that entered the European Union in May 2004 have achieved a decade of impressive export growth, expanding significantly their shares of world markets. Does this mean that the real exchange rate is irrelevant? If not, what other factors compensated for the appreciation to explain the apparently strong competitiveness of these economies? And will these favorable factors continue to power export growth? This paper places in international context the achievements of the CEE-8 and helps more broadly to identify the determinants of international competitiveness. Building from data at the six-digit level of disaggregation, it shows that the CEE-8 made an impressive shift in product quality and in the technological intensity of exports, and that these shifts associated with the structural transformation were also associated with increased market share. The analysis strongly suggests that, when trading in international markets, countries benefit from higher product quality. However, while the structural transformation achieved was valuable in raising market shares, the easy gains from this process may be over.

Global Housing Cycles

Housing cycles and their impact on the financial system and the macroeconomy have become the center of attention following the global financial crisis. This paper documents the characteristics of housing cycles in a large set of countries, and examines the determinants of house price movements. Empirical analysis shows that house price dynamics are mostly driven by income and demographics but fluctuations in these fundamentals and credit conditions can create deviations from the implied equilibrium path. We conclude with a discussion of the macroeconomic implications of house price corrections.

Three Cycles: Housing, Credit, and Real Activity

We examine the characteristics and comovement of cycles in house prices, credit, real activity and interest rates in advanced economies during the past 25 years, using a dynamic generalised factor model. House price cycles generally lead credit and business cycles over the long term, while in the short to medium run the relationship varies across countries. Interest rates tend to lag other cycles at all time horizons. While global factors are important, the U.S. business cycle, house price cycle and interest rate cycle tend to lead the respective cycles in other countries over all time horizons. However, the U.S. credit cycle leads mostly over the long term.

Bank Lending in Turkey: Effects of Monetary and Fiscal Policies

We study the impact of monetary and fiscal policies on credit growth in Turkey using bank-level data from the last quarter of 2002 to the first quarter of 2008. We find evidence that the liquidity-constrained banks have a sharper decline in lending during contractionary monetary policies and that the crowding-out effect diminishes more for banks with a retail banking focus when the government adopts fiscal discipline. However, the results are statistically weak. Hence, the evidence is not strong enough to irrefutably document the bank lending channel and the impact of government finances on loan supply in Turkey even though these effects may be operational.

Monetary Policy and Balance Sheets

This paper examines the transmission of monetary policy shocks through private sector balance sheets in the United States over the past three decades. Using a Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression (FAVAR) model on an expanded dataset, including sectoral balance sheet variables, we show that the balance sheets of various economic agents act as important links in the monetary policy transmission mechanism and affect the impulse response of inflation, output, and unemployment. Balance sheets of financial intermediaries, such as commercial banks, asset-backed-security issuers and, to a lesser extent, security brokers and dealers, shrink in response to monetary tightening, while money market fund assets grow. However, their economic significance in the run-up to the recent financial crisis was small. Furthermore, judging from the magnitude of the interest rate elasticity of house price changes, it seems that large increases in interest rates would have been needed to avert a rapid rise of house prices and an unsustainable increase in leverage. This suggests that financial stability concerns may require some role for other policies such as macroprudential policy.

Wall Street, Capitol Hill, and K Street: Political Influence and Financial Regulation

This paper explores the link between the political influence of the financial industry and financial regulation in the run-up to the global financial crisis. We construct a detailed database documenting the lobbying activities, campaign contributions, and political connections of the financial industry from 1999 to 2006 in the United States. We find evidence that spending on lobbying by the financial industry and network connections between lobbyists and legislators were positively associated with the probability of a legislator changing positions in favor of deregulation. The evidence also suggests that hiring lobbyists who had worked for legislators in the past enhanced this link.

Real Effects of Capital Inflows in Emerging Markets

We examine the association between capital inflows and industry growth in a sample of 22 emerging market economies from 1998 to 2010. We expect more external finance dependent industries in countries that host more capital inflows to grow disproportionately faster. This is indeed the case in the pre-crisis period of 1998–2007, and is driven by debt, rather than equity, inflows. We also observe a reduction in output volatility but this association is more pronounced for equity, rather than debt, inflows. These relationships, however, break down during the crisis, hinting at the importance of an undisrupted global financial system for emerging markets to harness the growth benefits of capital inflows. In line with this observation, we also document that the inflows-growth nexus is stronger in countries with well-functioning banks.