Changing Credit Limits, Changing Business Cycles

Henrik Jensen, Emiliano Santoro and Søren Hove Ravn

No 10462, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: In the last decades, capital markets across the industrialized world have undergone massive deregulation, involving increases in the loan-to-value (LTV) ratios of households and firms. We study the business-cycle implications of this phenomenon in a dynamic general equilibrium model with multiple credit-constrained agents. Starting from low LTV ratios, a progressive relaxation of credit constraints leads to both higher macroeconomic volatility and stronger comovement between debt and real variables. This pattern reverses at LTV ratios not far from those currently observed in many advanced economies, since credit constraints become non-binding more often. As expansionary shocks may make credit constraints non-binding, while contractionary shocks cannot, recessions become deeper than expansions. The non-monotonic relationship between credit market conditions and macroeconomic fluctuations poses a serious challenge for regulatory and macroprudential policies.

Keywords: Business cycles; Capital-market liberalization; Capital-market regulation; Occasionally non-binding contract constraints (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E32 E44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-dge, nep-mac and nep-mfd
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Journal Article: Changing credit limits, changing business cycles (2018)
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