Concerted Efforts? Monetary Policy and Macro-Prudential Tools

Abstract

The inception of macro-prudential policy frameworks in the wake of the global financial crisis raises questions of how macro-prudential and monetary policies should be coordinated. We examine these questions through the lens of a macroeconomic model featuring nominal rigidities, housing, incomplete risk-sharing between borrower and saver households, and macro-prudential tools in the form of mortgage loan-to-value and bank capital requirements. We derive a welfare-based loss function which suggests a role for active macro-prudential policy to enhance risk sharing. Macro-prudential policy faces trade-offs, however, and complete macro-prudential stabilization is not generally possible in our model. Nonetheless, simulations of a house price boom and subsequent correction suggest that macro-prudential tools could alleviate debt-deleveraging and help avoid zero lower bound episodes, even when macro-prudential tools themselves impose only occasionally binding constraints on debt dynamics in the economy.