The impact of lending standards on default rates of residential real estate loans

João Gaudêncio, Agnieszka Mazany and Claudia Schwarz

No 220, Occasional Paper Series from European Central Bank

Abstract: This paper analyses the impact of lending standards for residential real estate (RRE) loans on default rates, using a novel loan-level dataset from the European DataWarehouse (EDW) that covers eight euro area countries. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to use, for this purpose, a consistent set of loan-level data on loans originated in multiple euro area countries. Previous literature has used either national loan-level data, which does not allow for cross-country comparisons, or aggregate cross-country data. The dataset is first explored through an extensive descriptive analysis and this is followed by static probit regressions. The findings confirm the key influence of lending standards – in particular, loan-to-value and loan-to-income ratios at origination, original loan maturity and borrower employment status – on loan default rates. The impact of other variables, such as interest rate fixation and payment type, varies depending on the country of loan origination. These results are particularly relevant for microprudential supervisors in their ongoing assessment of banks’ credit policies. The highlighted country specificities should be taken into account in macroprudential policymaking. JEL Classification: C25, G21

Keywords: default probability; lending standards; loan-level data; loan defaults; residential real estate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-eec and nep-ure
Note: 3430849
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecb:ecbops:2019220

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