Tomasz Wieladek

Low Interest Rates and Housing Booms: The Role of Capital Inflows, Monetary Policy and Financial Innovation

A number of OECD countries experienced an environment of low interest rates and a rapid increase in housing market activity during the last decade. Previous work suggests three potential explanations for these events: expansionary monetary policy, capital inflows due to a global savings glut and excessive financial innovation combined with inappropriately lax financial regulation. In this study we examine the effects of these three factors on the housing market. We estimate a panel VAR for a sample of OECD countries and identify monetary policy and capital inflows shocks using sign restrictions. To explore how these effects change with the structure of the mortgage market and the degree of securitisation, we augment the VAR to let the coefficients vary with mortgage market characteristics. Our results suggest that both types of shocks have a significant and positive effect on real house prices, real credit to the private sector and real residential investment. The responses of housing variables to both types of shocks are stronger in countries with more developed mortgage markets, roughly doubling the responses to a monetary policy shock. The amplification effect of mortgage-backed securitisation is particularly strong for capital inflows shocks, increasing the response of real house prices, residential investment and real credit by a factor of two, three and five, respectively.

Identifying channels of credit substitution when bank capital requirements are varied

What kinds of credit substitution, if any, occur when changes to banks’ minimum capital requirements induce banks to change their supply of credit? The question is central to the new ‘macroprudential’ policy regimes that have been constructed in the wake of the global financial crisis, under which minimum capital ratio requirements for banks will be employed to control the supply of bank credit. Regulatory efforts to influence the aggregate supply of credit may be thwarted to some degree by ‘leakages’, as other credit suppliers substitute for the variation induced in the supply of credit by regulated banks. Credit substitution could occur through foreign banks operating domestic branches that are not subject to capital regulation by the domestic supervisor, or through bond and stock markets. The UK experience for the period 1998-2007 is ideally suited to address these questions, given its unique regulatory history (UK bank regulators imposed bank-specific and time-varying capital requirements on regulated banks), the substantial presence of both domestically regulated and foreign regulated banks, and the United Kingdom’s deep capital markets. We show that leakage by foreign branches can occur either as a result of competition between branches and regulated banks that are parts of separate banking groups, or because a foreign banking group shifts loans from its UK-regulated subsidiary to its affiliated branch. The responsiveness of affiliated branches is nearly twice as strong. We do not find any evidence for leakages through capital markets. These findings reinforce the need for the type of international co-ordination, specifically reciprocity in capital requirement regulation, which is embedded in Basel III and the European CRD IV directive, which will be gradually phased in starting January 2014.

Too big to fail: Some empirical evidence on the causes and consequences of public banking interventions in the UK

During the 2007-09 financial crisis, the banking sector received an extraordinary level of public support. In this empirical paper, we examine the determinants of a number of public sector interventions: government funding or central bank liquidity insurance schemes, public capital injections, and nationalisations. We use bank-level data spanning all British and foreign banks operating within the United Kingdom. We use multinomial logit regression techniques and find that a bank’s size, relative to the size of the entire banking system, typically has a large positive and non-linear effect on the probability of public sector intervention for a bank. We also use instrumental variable techniques to show that British interventions helped; there is fragile evidence that the wholesale (non-core) funding of an affected institution increased significantly following capital injection or nationalisation.

The spillovers, interactions, and (un)intended consequences of monetary and regulatory policies

Have bank regulatory policies and unconventional monetary policies—and any possible interactions—been a factor behind the recent “deglobalisation” in cross-border bank lending? To test this hypothesis, we use bank-level data from the UK—a country at the heart of the global financial system. Our results suggest that increases in microprudential capital requirements tend to reduce international bank lending and some forms of unconventional monetary policy can amplify this effect. Specifically, the UK’s Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS) significantly amplified the effects of increased capital requirements on cross-border lending. Quantitative easing did not appear to have a similar effect. We find that this interaction between microprudential regulations and the FLS can explain roughly 30% of the contraction in aggregate UK cross-border bank lending between mid-2012 and end-2013, corresponding to around 10% of the global contraction in cross-border lending. This suggests that unconventional monetary policy designed to support domestic lending can have the unintended consequence of reducing foreign lending.

Monetary policy, capital inflows and the housing boom

A range of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the boom in house prices that occurred in the United States from the mid-1990s to 2007. This paper considers the relative importance of two of these hypotheses. First, global imbalances increased liquidity in the US financial system, driving down long-term real interest rates. Second, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low in the first half of the 2000s. Both factors reduced the cost of borrowing and may have encouraged the boom in house prices. This paper develops an empirical framework to separate the relative contributions of these two factors to the US housing market. The results suggest that capital inflows to the United States played a bigger role in generating the increase in house prices than monetary policy loosening. Using VAR methods, we find that compared to monetary policy, the effect of a capital inflows shock on US house prices and residential investment is about twice as large and substantially more persistent. Results from variance decompositions suggest that, at a forecast horizon of 20 quarters, capital flows shocks explain 15% of the variation in real house prices, while monetary policy shocks explain only 5%. In a simple counterfactual exercise, we find that if the ratio of the current account deficit to GDP had remained constant since the end of 1998, real house prices by the end of 2007 would have been 13% lower. Similar exercises with constant policy rates and the path of policy rates implied by the Taylor rule deliver smaller effects.

Capital Requirements, Risk Shifting and the Mortgage Market

We study the effect of changes to bank-specific capital requirements on mortgage loan supply with a new loan-level dataset containing all mortgages issued in the UK between 2005Q2 and 2007Q2. We find that a rise of a 100 basis points in capital requirements leads to a 5.4% decline in individual loan size by bank. Loans issued by competing banks rise by roughly the same amount, which is indicative of credit substitution. Borrowers with an impaired credit history (verified income) are not (most) affected. This is consistent with origination of riskier loans to grow capital by raising retained earnings. No evidence for credit substitution of non-bank finance companies is found.

Estimation of short dynamic panels in the presence of cross-sectional dependence and dynamic eterogeneity

We propose a Bayesian approach to dynamic panel estimation in the presence of cross-sectional dependence and dynamic heterogeneity which is suitable for inference in short panels, unlike alternative estimators. Monte Carlo simulations indicate that our estimator produces less bias, and a lower root mean squared error, than existing estimators. The method is illustrated by estimating a panel VAR on sector level data for labour productivity and hours worked growth for Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the UK and the US from 1992 Q1 to 2011 Q3. We use historical decompositions to examine the determinants of recent output growth in each country. This exercise demonstrates that failure to take cross-sectional dependence into account leads to highly misleading results.

Is the “Great Recession” really so different from the past?

Based on the decline in real GDP growth, many economists now believe that the ‘Great Recession’, the output contraction the world experienced in 2008–09, is the deepest global economic contraction since the Great Depression. But as real-time real GDP data are typically revised, we investigate if the decline in, and total output loss (severity) of, G-7 real GDP during the ‘Great Recession’ is really so different from the past. We use a GDP weighted average of, as well as a dynamic common factor extracted from, real-time G-7 real GDP data to verify if this is the case. Furthermore, we use a Mincer-Zarnowitz (1969) forecast efficiency regression to predict the revision to G-7 real GDP growth during the ‘Great Recession’, based on outturns of unrevised variables. In real-time data, the depth and intensity of the ‘Great ecession’ are similar to the mid-1970s recession. The Mincer-Zarnowitz (1969) model predicts a revision to G-7 real GDP growth of about 1.9%. Tentatively these facts imply that G-7 real GDP growth during the 2008–09 period may yet be revised to be in line with past deep recessions, but this conclusion is subject to the caveat that the revisions process may have changed over time.

The international transmission of bank capital requirements: evidence from the United Kingdom

We use data on UK banks’ minimum capital requirements to study the impact of changes to bank-specific capital requirements on cross-border bank loan supply from 1999 Q1 to 2006 Q4. By examining a sample in which each recipient country has multiple relationships with UK-resident banks, we are able to control for demand effects. We find a negative and statistically significant effect of changes to banks’ capital requirements on cross-border lending: a 100 basis point increase in the requirement is associated with a reduction in the growth rate of cross-border credit of 5.5 percentage points. We also find that banks tend to favour their most important country relationships, so that the negative cross-border credit supply response in ‘core’ countries is significantly less than in others. Banks tend to cut back cross-border credit to other banks (including foreign affiliates) more than to firms and households, consistent with shorter maturity, wholesale lending which is easier to roll off and may be associated with weaker borrowing relationships.

Cross-Border Regulatory Spillovers: How Much? How Important? What Sectors? Lessons from the United Kingdom

This paper forms the United Kingdom’s contribution to the International Banking Research Network’s project examining the cross-border spillovers of prudential policy actions, where each participant in the network uses proprietary bank-level data available to central banks. We examine whether UK-owned banks’ domestic lending is affected by prudential actions in other countries where they have exposures. We also examine the impact of a change in prudential policy in a foreign-owned UK-resident bank’s home jurisdiction on its lending to the United Kingdom. Our results suggest that prudential actions taken abroad do not have significant spillover effects on bank lending in the UK economy as a whole. But there are more granular effects: for instance, when a foreign authority tightens loan-to-value standards, UK affiliates of banks owned from that country expand their lending to UK households and corporates.