Preventing financial disasters: Macroprudential policy and financial crises

Alvaro Fernandez-Gallardo

European Economic Review, 2023, vol. 151, issue C

Abstract: The ultimate goal of macroprudential policy is to prevent and reduce the costs of systemic financial crises, and thus contribute to promoting sustainable economic growth. However, despite the active role played by such policies in recent decades, there is still limited empirical evidence regarding whether prudential regulation is effective to enhance financial stability by preventing and mitigating crisis risk. This paper seeks to close that gap by studying the relationship between macroprudential policy and both the likelihood and severity of financial crises. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, I show that macroprudential policy tightenings are successful at reducing the frequency of systemic financial crises. Moreover, this result holds even if macroprudential policies are implemented when the economy is already experiencing a financial boom or when monetary conditions are rather accommodative. I point to the prevention and mitigation of financial booms as the main transmission mechanism through which macroprudential policy defuses crisis risk. Second, I find that macroprudential policy enhances the resilience of the financial system, by dampening the output losses associated with future systemic financial crises. The latter result implies that macroprudential policy not only makes financial crises less likely, but also less painful.

Keywords: Macroprudential policy; Systemic financial crises; Local projections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E58 E61 G01 G28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292122002306
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:eecrev:v:151:y:2023:i:c:s0014292122002306

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2022.104350

Access Statistics for this article

European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer

More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().