Household Risk Management and Actual Mortgage Choice in the Euro Area

Michael Ehrmann and Michael Ziegelmeyer

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross-country study has analyzed what determines household demand for mortgage types, a task that this paper takes up using new data for the euro area. Our results support the hypothesis of Campbell and Cocco (2003) that the decision is best described as household risk management: income volatility reduces the take-out of ARMs, while increasing duration and relative size of the mortgages increase it. Controlling for other supply factors through country fixed effects, loan pricing also matters, as expected, with ARMs becoming more attractive when yield spreads rise. The paper also conducts a simulation exercise to identify how the easing of monetary policy during the financial crisis affected mortgage holders. It shows that the resulting reduction in mortgage rates produced a substantial decline in debt burdens among mortgage-holding households, especially in countries where households have higher debt burdens and a larger share of ARMs, as well as for some disadvantaged groups of households, such as those with low income.

Keywords: Credit and credit aggregates; Transmission of monetary policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 E43 E52 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-mac and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/wp2014-1.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Household Risk Management and Actual Mortgage Choice in the Euro Area (2014)
Working Paper: Household risk management and actual mortgage choice in the euro area (2014)
Working Paper: Household Risk Management and Actual Mortgage Choice in the Euro Area (2014)
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:bca:bocawp:14-1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada 234 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0G9, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().