The costs of macroprudential deleveraging in a liquidity trap

Abstract

We study various macroprudential tools and their interaction with monetary policy in a New Keynesian model featuring long-term debt, illiquid housing and an effective lower bound constraint on policy rates. We find that the short-run deleveraging costs of different macroprudential tools – all sized to imply the same reduction in household debt in the medium and long-term – can differ significantly, depending on the state of economy and monetary policy. Specifically, a loan-to-value tightening is more than three times as contractionary as a loan-to-income tightening when debt is high and monetary policy cannot accommodate.