How Do Mortgage Rate Resets Affect Consumer Spending and Debt Repayment? Evidence from Canadian Consumers

Katya Kartashova and Xiaoqing Zhou

Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 2025, vol. 57, issue 5, 1167-1210

Abstract: One of the most important channels through which monetary policy affects the real economy is changes in mortgage rates. This paper studies the effects of mortgage rate changes resulting from monetary policy shifts on homeowners' spending, debt repayment, and defaults. The Canadian institutional setting facilitates the design of identification strategies for causal inference, since the vast majority of mortgages in the country experience predetermined, periodic, and automatic contract renewals with the mortgage rate reset based on the prevailing market rate. This allows us to exploit quasi‐random variation in the timing of the rate reset and to present causal evidence for both rate declines and increases using detailed, representative consumer credit panel data. We find asymmetric effects of rate changes on spending, debt repayment, and defaults. Our results can be rationalized by the conventional cash‐flow effect in conjunction with changes in consumer expectations about future interest rates upon the reset. Given the pervasiveness of Canadian‐type mortgages in many other OECD countries, our findings have broader implications for the transmission of monetary policy to the household sector.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jmcb.13055

Related works:
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:wly:jmoncb:v:57:y:2025:i:5:p:1167-1210

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Money, Credit and Banking is currently edited by Robert deYoung, Paul Evans, Pok-Sang Lam and Kenneth D. West

More articles in Journal of Money, Credit and Banking from Blackwell Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().