Nexus of governance, macroprudential policy and financial risk: cross-country evidence

The quake of the financial crisis has restored macroprudential policy as an apparent policy paradigm to minimize financial risk; however to a great extent, its impact depends on different externalities including country governance. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the joint impact of macroprudential policies (MPPs) and quality of country governance (CG) on financial risk (FR) for a panel of 124 countries covering the period 2000–2017. To attain this objective, we use directed acyclic graph to decide our model, construct indices for FR and governance by principal component analysis, investigate the impact of CG and MPPs at different quantiles of FR and explore their nonlinear relationship by panel threshold model. Besides, we also apply two-stage least squares (2SLS) and system GMM to address the endogeneity of the estimation. Our results show that both CG and MPPs are effective to minimize financial exposures and their effectiveness increases with higher FR, though after certain level, governance moderates the effect of MPPs on FR. Overall, we find MPPs are more effective in emerging economies and in normal time, whereas during crisis they are found less effective. Our findings are robust to alternative measures of risk and control variables and different econometric tests, which could be useful for policy makers to formulate MPPs, minimize financial risk and to maintain financial stability.