Regional heterogeneity and the refinancing channel of monetary policy

Martin Beraja, Andreas Fuster, Erik Hurst and Joseph Vavra

No 731, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: We argue that the time-varying regional distribution of housing equity influences the aggregate consequences of monetary policy through its effects on mortgage refinancing. Using detailed loan-level data, we show that regional differences in housing equity affect refinancing and spending responses to interest rate cuts but that these effects vary over time with changes in the regional distribution of house price growth. We then build a heterogeneous household model of refinancing with both mortgage borrowers and lenders and use it to explore the aggregate implications for monetary policy arising from our regional evidence. We find that the 2008 equity distribution made spending in depressed regions less responsive to interest rate cuts, thus dampening aggregate stimulus and increasing regional consumption inequality, whereas the opposite occurred in some earlier recessions. Taken together, our results strongly suggest that monetary policy makers should track the regional distribution of equity over time.

Keywords: monetary policy; regional inequality; mortgage refinancing; quantitative easing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 E52 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 73 pages
Date: 2015-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-lab, nep-mac, nep-mon, nep-opm and nep-ure
Note: Former title: Regional heterogeneity and monetary policy
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/rese ... orts/sr731.pdf?la=en Full text (application/pdf)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr731.html Summary (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Regional Heterogeneity and the Refinancing Channel of Monetary Policy (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednsr:731

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().