UCD College of Social Sciences and Law will host the Garret FitzGerald Lecture and Autumn School on Monday 19th October, in the UCD Sutherland School of Law. The daytime School (from midday) will focus on the significance of the social sciences. The evening Lecture will be delivered by Professor Cass R Sunstein,Harvard Law School, on the theme ‘Is Behavioural Science Compatible with Democracy?’. More details and bookings here.
Category: Regulation
The conference on macroprudential regulation originally scheduled for September 4th has been postponed to Friday, January 29th, 2016. See here for all details on the conference. A full programme will be provided closer to the date.
Call for Papers: Macroprudential regulation: policy dynamics and limitations
A joint academic-practitioner conference with the theme Macroprudential regulation: policy dynamics and limitations will be held in Dublin, Ireland on Friday September 4th, 2015, organized by the Financial Mathematics and Computation Cluster (FMC2), the Department of Economics, Finance & Accounting at Maynooth University and the UCD School of Business at University College Dublin.
Macroprudential regulation is fairly new, and there are many unanswered questions. Can macroprudential constraints on credit be reliably attuned with the business cycle and/or credit cycle? Are fixed constraints on credit safer and more reliable than attempts at dynamic anti-cyclical ones? Should regulators take account of market or regulatory imperfections, such as in the construction sector, in setting constraints on credit growth? Is macroprudential control by an independent central bank consistent with the democratic accountability of government economic and social policies? Potential topics include:
* Business cycles, financial cycles, and the feasibility of dynamic macroprudential control
* The desirability and effectiveness of LTI and LTV limits on mortgage lending
* Democratic accountability and central bank independence
* Modelling house price movements and household debt and their interactions
* Controlling credit growth and credit flows in the Eurozone
* International case studies of macroprudential regulation.
* Assessment of macroprudential credit-restricting policies
Please send papers or detailed proposals by June 15th, 2015 at the latest to Irene.moore@ucd.ie; all papers must be submitted electronically in adobe pdf format. There will be both main conference sessions and poster sessions. We will consider proposed contributions to the poster session until 31st July. The academic coordinators for the conference are Gregory Connor and John Cotter, who can be contacted at Gregory.connor@nuim.ie or John.cotter@ucd.ie.
There are no submission fees or attendance fees for the conference. We are grateful to the Science Foundation of Ireland and the Irish Institute of Bankers for their generous support of this conference. The Financial Mathematics Computation Cluster (FMC2) is a collaboration between University College Dublin, Maynooth University, Dublin City University and industry partners, with support from the Science Foundation of Ireland.
The Irish Central Bank is planning to impose macroprudential risk regulation on the domestic banking sector (see here). The general approach of the Irish Central Bank has been widely welcomed by economists, although the specifics of the proposals are controversial.
John Cotter (UCD) and I are planning a conference in September 2015 on macroprudential regulation, the fifth in our series of FMCC conferences on financial risk and regulation. Macroprudential regulation is fairly new, and there are many unanswered questions. Can macroprudential constraints on credit be reliably attuned with the business cycle and/or credit cycle? Are a-cyclical constraints on credit safer and more reliable than attempts at anti-cyclical ones? Should regulators take account of market imperfections, such as the poor performance of the Irish property development industry and the high costs of new housing construction in Ireland, in setting constraints on credit growth?
Macroprudential regulation has particular importance in Ireland, a small open economy buffeted by credit flows from bigger neighbours. The failure to impose macroprudential regulatory control on the Irish banking sector was a central cause of the Irish financial crisis of 2008-2011. During 2000-2007, within a flawed eurozone currency system, a politically-neutered Irish Central Bank ignored a runaway inflow of foreign credit into the Irish banking system. This massive credit inflow undermined the stability of the Irish financial system and led to the disastrous failure of the Irish domestic banking sector.
There is a varied range of views among economists on macroprudential regulation. This is clear in the responses to the Irish Central Bank’s policy discussion document. Three thoughtful responses come from David Duffy and Kieran McQuinn (both at ESRI) here, Ronan Lyons (TCD) here, and Karl Whelan (UCD) here. (For full disclosure, my own response to the Irish Central Bank discussion document is here.) Lyons recommends fixed, a-cyclical credit controls whereas Duffy and McQuinn argue for dynamic, anti-cyclical controls. Duffy and McQuinn stress the need for more new housing in light of fast Irish demographic growth, and the positive role of high housing prices (aided by bank credit growth) in eliciting an adequate supply response. Lyons argues that excessive bank credit growth should not be used as a hidden subsidy for a cost-inefficient building industry.
Lyons makes a case for no loan-to-income (LTI) constraint, instead relying only upon a loan-to-value (LTV) constraint for macroprudential credit control. This contrasts sharply with the view of Karl Whelan who argues for LTI-only macroprudential controls in the current Irish case. Duffy and McQuinn advocate for both controls. I share the view of Duffy and McQuinn. Lyons does not consider the importance of dual-trigger mortgage default in Ireland (that is, mortgage default which is triggered jointly by income stress and negative equity). The amount of Irish mortgage arrears is likely to remain large and volatile, and this is a key potential source of market instability. Both initial LTI and initial LTV ratios are linked to subsequent mortgage default probabilities, so both should be controlled.
There are certainly many points for discussion, which should make for an interesting conference! A formal Call for Papers will follow shortly – if there are particular themes or panels that we should include, feel free to mention them in the comments thread below.
The Irish Central Bank is scheduled to introduce new macro-prudential risk controls on Irish mortgage lending, with the new regulations taking effect on January 1st or soon thereafter. One of the regulations will limit most new mortgages to an initial loan-to-value ratio of 80% or less. There has been considerable discussion of the effect of loan-to-value limits on potential property purchasers, but the analysis has been very poorly framed.
The budgeting scenario has been described as follows:
“Consider a couple who wish to purchase a €300,000 property. With a LTV limit of 80% this will require that they save €60,000 for the down payment whereas if they were allowed to borrow 85% they would only need savings of €45,000.”
This oft-repeated budgeting scenario misrepresents the nature of market-wide LTV limits imposed by the Central Bank. This budgeting scenario gives the impression that the policy decision is about imposing/not imposing the LTV constraint on only one particular buyer rather than market-wide. It misses the large compositional effects since leveraged property buyers compete with one another for properties. The degree of leverage allowed in the banking system feeds into property prices, and this affects the opportunity set of purchasers.