IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecolet/v212y2022ics0165176522000064.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

House prices, the distribution of household debt and the refinancing channel of monetary policy

Author

Listed:
  • Cumming, Fergus
  • Hubert, Paul

Abstract

We investigate why the effect of monetary policy on aggregate consumption depends on the distribution of household indebtedness. Using UK loan-level micro-data, we identify the fraction of households with a limited ability to smooth consumption and find that the heterogeneous impact of monetary policy on consumption depends on house price dynamics and the share of highly-indebted households. Consumption responds strongly to monetary policy when the share of highly-indebted households is large and house prices have recently decreased, but we find no effect after periods of house price growth. Our results highlight the role of household heterogeneity and the refinancing channel in the transmission of monetary policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Cumming, Fergus & Hubert, Paul, 2022. "House prices, the distribution of household debt and the refinancing channel of monetary policy," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 212(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:212:y:2022:i:c:s0165176522000064
    DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2022.110280
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176522000064
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.econlet.2022.110280?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Christina D. Romer & David H. Romer, 2004. "A New Measure of Monetary Shocks: Derivation and Implications," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(4), pages 1055-1084, September.
    2. Sterk, Vincent & Tenreyro, Silvana, 2018. "The transmission of monetary policy through redistributions and durable purchases," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(C), pages 124-137.
    3. Patrick J. Kehoe & Virgiliu Midrigan & Elena Pastorino, 2019. "Debt Constraints and Employment," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 127(4), pages 1926-1991.
    4. Cumming, Fergus & Dettling, Lisa, 2019. "Monetary policy and birth rates: the effect of mortgage rate pass-through on fertility," Bank of England working papers 835, Bank of England.
    5. Martin Beraja & Andreas Fuster & Erik Hurst & Joseph Vavra, 2019. "Regional Heterogeneity and the Refinancing Channel of Monetary Policy," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 134(1), pages 109-183.
    6. David Berger & Konstantin Milbradt & Fabrice Tourre & Joseph Vavra, 2021. "Mortgage Prepayment and Path-Dependent Effects of Monetary Policy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 111(9), pages 2829-2878, September.
    7. Greg Kaplan & Benjamin Moll & Giovanni L. Violante, 2018. "Monetary Policy According to HANK," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(3), pages 697-743, March.
    8. Greg Kaplan & Giovanni L. Violante & Justin Weidner, 2014. "The Wealthy Hand-to-Mouth," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 48(1 (Spring), pages 77-153.
    9. Slacalek, Jiri & Tristani, Oreste & Violante, Giovanni L., 2020. "Household balance sheet channels of monetary policy: A back of the envelope calculation for the euro area," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).
    10. James Cloyne & Clodomiro Ferreira & Paolo Surico, 2020. "Monetary Policy when Households have Debt: New Evidence on the Transmission Mechanism," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 87(1), pages 102-129.
    11. Bilbiie, Florin O., 2020. "The New Keynesian cross," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 90-108.
    12. Carlos Garriga & Aaron Hedlund, 2020. "Mortgage Debt, Consumption, and Illiquid Housing Markets in the Great Recession," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 110(6), pages 1603-1634, June.
    13. Mishkin, Frederic S, 1976. "Illiquidity, Consumer Durable Expenditure, and Monetary Policy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 66(4), pages 642-654, September.
    14. Greg Kaplan & Giovanni L. Violante & Justin Weidner, 2014. "The Wealthy Hand-to-Mouth," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 45(1 (Spring), pages 77-153.
    15. Hanson, Samuel G. & Stein, Jeremy C., 2015. "Monetary policy and long-term real rates," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 115(3), pages 429-448.
    16. Marco Di Maggio & Amir Kermani & Benjamin J. Keys & Tomasz Piskorski & Rodney Ramcharan & Amit Seru & Vincent Yao, 2017. "Interest Rate Pass-Through: Mortgage Rates, Household Consumption, and Voluntary Deleveraging," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(11), pages 3550-3588, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Juniours Marire, 2024. "Interactive influence of house prices and the repo rate on household debt in South Africa," Journal of Economic Analysis, Anser Press, vol. 3(1), pages 58-78, March.
    2. Huazhu Zheng & Jiao Qian & Guihuan Liu & Yongjiao Wu & Claudio O. Delang & Hongming He, 2023. "Housing prices and household consumption: a threshold effect model analysis in central and western China," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 1-16, December.
    3. Cumming, Fergus, 2022. "Mortgage cash-flows and employment," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 144(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Fergus Cumming & Paul Hubert, 2019. "The Role of Households' Borrowing Constraints in the Transmission of Monetary Policy This paper investigates how the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy depends on the distribution of ," Documents de Travail de l'OFCE 2019-20, Observatoire Francais des Conjonctures Economiques (OFCE).
    2. Fergus Cumming & Paul Hubert, 2019. "The role of households' borrowing constraints in the transmission of monetary policy," Sciences Po publications 20/2019, Sciences Po.
    3. Cumming, Fergus, 2022. "Mortgage cash-flows and employment," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 144(C).
    4. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/5buvtkmlk091prrdje4a0tbkla is not listed on IDEAS
    5. James Cloyne & Clodomiro Ferreira & Paolo Surico, 2020. "Monetary Policy when Households have Debt: New Evidence on the Transmission Mechanism," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 87(1), pages 102-129.
    6. Hubert Paul, 2021. "Does household mortgage debt influence the transmission of monetary policy in the United Kingdom? [L’endettement immobilier des ménages influence-t-il la transmission de la politique monétaire au R," Bulletin de la Banque de France, Banque de France, issue 236.
    7. Sumit Agarwa & Yongheng Deng & Quanlin Gu & Jia He & Wenlan Qian & Yuan Ren, 2022. "Mortgage Debt, Hand-to-Mouth Households, and Monetary Policy Transmission [Policy intervention in debt renegotiation: evidence from the home affordable modification program]," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 26(3), pages 487-520.
    8. Florin Bilbiie & Xavier Ragot, 2021. "Optimal Monetary Policy and Liquidity with Heterogeneous Households," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 41, pages 71-95, July.
    9. Roman Sustek, 2022. "A Back-of-the-Envelope Analysis of House Prices: Czech Republic, 2013-2021," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp737, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    10. repec:hal:wpspec:info:hdl:2441/j75mfllkr89c8aod1nr586ksc is not listed on IDEAS
    11. Tzamourani, Panagiota, 2021. "The interest rate exposure of euro area households," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 132(C).
    12. Amina Enkhbold, 2023. "Monetary Policy Transmission, Bank Market Power, and Wholesale Funding Reliance," Staff Working Papers 23-35, Bank of Canada.
    13. Funke, Michael & Li, Xiang & Zhong, Doudou, 2023. "Household indebtedness, financial frictions and the transmission of monetary policy to consumption: Evidence from China," Emerging Markets Review, Elsevier, vol. 55(C).
    14. Cantore, Cristiano & Ferroni, Filippo & Mumtaz, Hroon & Theophilopoulou, Angeliki, 2022. "A tail of labour supply and a tale of monetary policy," Bank of England working papers 989, Bank of England.
    15. Paul Hubert & Frédérique Savignac, 2023. "Monetary Policy and Labor Income Inequality: the Role of Extensive and Intensive Margins," Working papers 913, Banque de France.
    16. Martin Eichenbaum & Sergio Rebelo & Arlene Wong, 2022. "State-Dependent Effects of Monetary Policy: The Refinancing Channel," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 112(3), pages 721-761, March.
    17. Koeniger, Winfried & Lennartz, Benedikt & Ramelet, Marc-Antoine, 2022. "On the transmission of monetary policy to the housing market," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 145(C).
    18. Slacalek, Jiri & Tristani, Oreste & Violante, Giovanni L., 2020. "Household balance sheet channels of monetary policy: A back of the envelope calculation for the euro area," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).
    19. Garriga, Carlos & Kydland, Finn E. & Šustek, Roman, 2021. "MoNK: Mortgages in a New-Keynesian model," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 123(C).
    20. Renzhi, Nuobu, 2023. "Household net saving positions and unconventional monetary policy transmission: Evidence from Japan," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).
    21. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/j75mfllkr89c8aod1nr586ksc is not listed on IDEAS
    22. Roman Sustek, 2021. "A back-of-the-envelope analysis of house prices: Czech Republic, 2013-2021," Discussion Papers 2120, Centre for Macroeconomics (CFM).
    23. Adrien Auclert, 2019. "Monetary Policy and the Redistribution Channel," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 109(6), pages 2333-2367, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Heterogeneity; Consumption; Mortgage debt;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:212:y:2022:i:c:s0165176522000064. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolet .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.