The Unassuming Economist

From the IMF’s latest report on Poland:

“The authorities’ proposals to increase housing affordability should consider the impact on the housing market and financial stability. The housing market has returned to pre-pandemic robust conditions (Figure 14). The state development bank plans to offer partial mortgage guarantees in lieu of mortgage down payments to support applicants for smaller mortgage loans, which could increase demand for mortgage loans and fuel further price growth. Mortgages are mostly floating rate, boosting housing affordability during the recent time of extraordinarily low interest rates. However, households could become overstretched as interest rates normalize, risking a deterioration in credit quality. To mitigate these risks, it is important that banks continue conservative creditworthiness assessments in line with supervisory guidelines, including an LTV limit at 80 percent, stressed DSTI at 40–50 percent with an interest rate buffer of 250–300 bps, and loan maturities capped at 25 years. Early signals suggest increasing policy interest rates are likely to dampen demand for mortgage credit.”

by Alex Tabarrok on February 21, 2022, posted on Margin Revolution.

“The WSJ has several good piece on electric power in the United States, many of which are relevant to my recent podcast with Ezra Klein. Starting with the increased unreliability of America’s electric grid.

The U.S. power system is faltering just as millions of Americans are becoming more dependent on it—not just to light their homes, but increasingly to work remotely, charge their phones and cars, and cook their food—as more modern conveniences become electrified.

… Much of the transmission system, which carries high-voltage electricity over long distances, was constructed just after World War II, with some lines built well before that. The distribution system, the network of smaller wires that takes electricity to homes and businesses, is also decades old, and accounts for the majority of outages.

We need more power but are relying on transmission lines we put into places decades ago when we could still build things. The second WSJ article is on the 17-year travail to get a new power cable from hydropower rich Quebec to Boston.

Blackstone made other discoveries that altered the project. Its environmental consultants spent the summer of 2010 watching patches of blue lupine for endangered Karner blue butterflies and frosted elfins, a threatened species. They spotted two Karners and wrote a plan for avoiding damage to the wildflowers upon which the butterflies rely. Arrangements were also made to protect bald eagle nests that might be present during construction and identify shagbark hickories big enough for the endangered Indiana bat to roost.”

Continue reading here.

From a NBER paper by Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom and Davide Furceri:

“We construct the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the frequency of the word “uncertainty” in the quarterly Economist Intelligence Unit country reports. Globally, the Index spikes around major events like the Gulf War, the Euro debt crisis, the Brexit vote and the COVID pandemic. The level of uncertainty is higher in developing countries but is more synchronized across advanced economies with their tighter trade and financial linkages. In a panel vector autoregressive setting we find that innovations in the WUI foreshadow significant declines in output. This effect is larger and more persistent in countries with lower institutional quality, and in sectors with greater financial constraints.”

Source: Poverty Action Lab, Paris School of Economics

In 1997, the Mexican government designed the conditional cash transfer program Progresa, which became the
worldwide model of a new approach to social programs, simultaneously targeting human capital accumulation
and poverty reduction. This paper studies the differential long-term impact of children’s exposure to Progresa, 20 years after its launch. The two focus groups include (a) children who were in-utero or in their initial years of life, and (b) children who were transitioning from primary to secondary school.

Results show that children exposed to the program in their early childhood witnessed better educational attainment and labor market outcomes, and the study of impacts on the second group shows that even the short-term impact of the program was sustained in the long run. Positive impacts manifested as larger labor incomes, more geographical mobility including through international migration, and later family formation. Besides, results from this paper also confirm that while conditional cash transfers are helpful in enhancing the educational and nutritional development of children in their formative stages, there is still a need for complementary policies to be rolled out so that the full range of households (not just ones with infants at the time of program rollout) are able to realize the full range of newly available labor market opportunities.

Click here to be a part of the discussion on this paper.

Speech by Governor Constantinos Herodotou, Central Bank of Cyprus:

“The fact that not all euro area countries receive relevant warnings and recommendations by the ESRB is an indication that the Residential Market in the euro area is characterised by heterogeneity. In the upper right quartile of the chart, we find a number of countries that registered an accumulated increase in residential property prices of at least 25% in the last three years.  Other countries have recorded accumulated growth as low as 5%. 

Using as a starting point the observed heterogeneity and by analysing the experiences of several countries, we can draw certain broad conclusions on the effectiveness of the macroprudential toolbox.

The design of Borrower and Capital Based Measures is a decision of authorities. For example, based on information from the ESRB, Belgium introduced a Loan-to-Value on both owner-occupied and buy-to-let properties. Cyprus, in order to deal with a specific sectoral exposure, further to the Loan-to-Value cap, recently introduced an even stricter Loan-to-Value for luxurious properties. However, by observing the real estate cycles registered in a number of countries, it is evident that even the idiosyncratic design of these measures does not always stop real estate cycles from materialising. The Netherlands and Slovenia are examples of countries that have recorded vulnerabilities despite the implementation of such measures.

Analysis performed at the Central Bank of Cyprus verifies this observation.

Using an econometric model, we explain the growth rates of housing loans and house prices considering the implementation of macroprudential measures.

The analysis indicates that the Loan-to-Value ratio seems to be effective in containing housing loans, for 10 out of 12 countries in our sample and effective in containing house prices in only in 3 out of the 12 cases. Income based measures (such as Debt-Service-to-Income) and Capital Based Measures were found to be effective in around half of the countries that use them.

We can therefore conclude, that there is no “one-size-fits-all” type of macroprudential tool.

One of the reasons why macroprudential tools are not always effective, could be that vulnerabilities are not necessarily driven by the credit cycles. In the cases examined, it is evident, that credit for house purchases is not always correlated with the trends in housing prices. For example, Slovenia and the Netherlands experienced a build-up in vulnerabilities in the residential real estate market without a corresponding excessive growth in housing loans.

Structural factors could explain the above observation as they affect both demand and supply of housing. More particularly,

*Net migration and population growth are factors that have continued to put pressure on house prices in countries such as Luxembourg, which experienced net population growth of 13,6% in 2020. Countries with low vulnerabilities in the housing market, such as Greece, experienced a negative population growth.

*Strong preference for home ownership could also be a driving factor for the observed vulnerabilities in Luxembourg and Slovakia. Homeowners represent 92,9% of the population of Slovakia whereas in France, a country with low identified real estate vulnerabilities,  homeowners represent 65,2%. 

From the above examples, we can conclude that in designing a macroprudential tool, idiosyncratic structural factors need to be identified and accounted for.”

Monetary policy also plays a role. Although macroprudential policy is the first line of defence, the ECB has recognised that Financial Stability is a precondition for price stability. It has also been acknowledged that monetary policy, can, in principle, influence asset prices such as real estate.

(…)

To sum up, the euro area residential real estate market is characterised by heterogeneity. Vulnerabilities in the real estate market are not necessarily cyclical in nature but structural factors also play a role. A single policy or measure cannot be enough to tackle the materialisation of risks from the residential market, although macroprudential authorities, as the first line of defence, have a significant toolbox in their hands, that can help in containing these risks.”