For many decades both UK and US politicians have encouraged homeownership supported by mortgage lending. Exuberant borrowing has fuelled housing booms and is central to many recent financial problems. As a consequence macroprudential policies have been developed to improve financial stability using a mixture of measures to deter excessive lending including loan-to-value and debt-to-income restrictions. This thesis considers macroprudential policymaking generally and, more specifically, this latter group of macroprudential measures. It concludes that it is unlikely that these measures can be used to any significant extent in western democracies. At its heart is their political legitimacy and the potential consequences for the institutions promulgating such policies since a major use of these limits would have a direct and very visible effect on home ownership aspirations. Further, the evidence indicates that these measures may well be ineffective. This thesis suggests that conduct of business regulatory policy and the use of mortgage affordability verification may be more effective. However, the successful employment these measures for macroprudential purposes may be hindered by the structure of UK financial services regulation. Moreover, there is a challenge in that historically, UK conduct of business regulation has often failed. Nevertheless, in the area of mortgage affordability, there may be opportunities to use innovative regulatory policies to reduce these risks going forward. Further, there may be lessons for the UK from the US's approach of using the concept of the "qualified mortgage" and, additionally, in considering the role of sound conduct of business policies such as those are used by the US Veterans Administration. Nevertheless, the failure to build sufficient homes over the last forty years is at the heart of UK financial instability. Macroprudential policy may have the unequal task of attempting to suppress house price booms. This raises political issues and highlights the constraints on macroprudential policy with limits on its ability to influence fiscal and socio-economic policy. This thesis seeks to influence the debate on what can be done to help to ensure financial stability.

Yes / In this paper, we focus on the financial and fiscal stress transmission for the G5 economies. Using financial and fiscal stress indexes, we assess the spillovers within each economy, as well as the cross-sectional effects. Two supplementary methodologies, measuring the degree of interconnectedness, are employed. Our findings indicate that the interactions between these two kinds of distress are intensive, especially during and after the Global Financial Crisis outbreak. The above reiterates the necessity for coordinated macroprudential policies, as a means to confine the adverse effects of excessive financial and fiscal stress.

Thesis advisor: Peter Ireland / Thesis advisor: Christopher Baum / In this dissertation, I focus on macroeconomic and macroprudential policies. In Chapter 1, I study the effectiveness of macroprudential policy tools on bank risk. The findings show that although macroprudential policy tools can stabilize the financial system, under certain conditions, they might have perverse effects. In Chapter 2, I examine monetary aggregates, and show that once measured correctly, they can be useful in gauging the stance of monetary policy. In Chapter 3, by studying the deter- minants of sovereign debt crises, I aim at improving our understanding of sovereign debt distress, and also strengthening the toolkit for crisis prevention. Chapter 1: Following the 2007-2009 financial crisis, there has been an increase in the use of macroprudential policy tools – such as loan-to-value ratio caps and interbank exposure limits – to achieve financial stability. Existing research on the effectiveness of macroprudential policy has focused on country-level variables such as total credit growth and house price inflation. In “The Effectiveness of Macropruden- tial Policy on Bank Risk,” I study how the effectiveness of macroprudential policy varies across banks and policy tools. Using system GMM on bank-level data from 30 European countries for the time period between 2000 and 2014, I document that stricter regulation in the form of exposure limitations tends to decrease banks’ risk levels whereas capital-based tools tend to induce higher risk-taking. After a policy tightening, loan loss provisions and non-performing loans ratios of banks suffering losses can increase substantially, up to five percentage points, while they are likely to decrease for profitable banks. Constraining activities by stricter regulation can lead to a search for yield. Therefore, policy designers should pay particular attention to the increase in risk-taking following policy tightening, especially by banks suffering losses. Chapter 2: It is crucial for policymakers to successfully gauge the stance of mon- etary policy and understand the mechanisms through which it affects the economy. Conventional models focus on interest rates alone, and omit monetary aggregates from policy discussions. In “Do Monetary Aggregates Belong in a Monetary Model? Evidence from the UK,” I examine whether augmenting the measure of monetary policy with monetary aggregates helps in drawing more robust links between policy and economic fluctuations. After constructing the Divisia money index for the United Kingdom, I employ structural vector autoregression to identify two different episodes of UK monetary policy regimes. Inclusion of this (correct) measure of the quantity of money and disentangling money supply from money demand remedy the price and liquidity puzzles which frequently appear in the vector autoregression literature. The results point to the informational content embedded in monetary aggregates, and suggest that monetary aggregates should be taken into account while evaluating monetary policy. Chapter 3: In assessing debt sustainability for advanced and emerging markets, the IMF’s Market Access Countries’ Debt Sustainability Analysis (MAC DSA) com- pares the levels of debt and gross financing needs (GFNs) against benchmarks sepa- rately derived from the noise-to-signal approach. In “Determinants of Sovereign Debt Crises,” I identify the main factors that contribute to sovereign debt crises. I take into account a broad range of debt distress drivers, including debt levels and gross fi- nancing needs, but also debt composition, macroeconomic fundamentals, and country characteristics such as whether the country is a small state or member of a currency union. By using the estimation results, I first derive an indicative cutoff probability of debt distress level. Then, I calculate the corresponding thresholds for debt variables, above which countries are predicted to experience an episode of debt distress. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

The aim of this study was to investigate how the amortization requirements of 2016 and 2018 haveaffected the housing prices in Stockholm county, using an event-study approach and a regressionanalysis. Furthermore, the paper studies how the regulations have affected single-family housescompared to tenant-owned apartments, if the effect was different for tenant-owned apartments ofdifferent sizes and if existing housing compared to newly produced housing were affected differently.The reasoning behind the introduction of amortization requirements was to regulate and decreasegrowing household indebtedness that was making Swedish households vulnerable to changes in theoverall economy. The second requirement aimed to further regulate household indebtedness and wasexpected to lower housing prices, which it received criticism for. The report is limited to thedevelopment of house prices for single-family houses and tenant-owned apartments betweenDecember 2013 and February 2019.The primary findings of this report are that the amortization requirements have resulted in decreasedexpected returns. Consistent with previous literature, the introduction of macroprudential policiesreduced the price growth for existing tenant-owned apartments and decreased the housing prices ofsingle-family houses and newly produced homes. The amortization requirements accomplished theFinancial Supervisory Authority’s aim of reducing household indebtedness, but increased the averageloan-to-value ratios for households. Lastly, it has become increasingly difficult for younger householdsto finance their housing purchase due to increased monthly payments and thereby failing to pass theleft-to-live-on computations created by lenders. At the same time, the rental housing market remainslimited. / Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur amorteringskraven som infördes under 2016 and 2018,påverkade bostadspriserna i Stockholms län. Genom att tillämpa en eventstudie och enregressionsanalys försöker denna studie förklara hur regleringarna har påverkat priserna för småhusjämfört med bostadsrätter, om påverkan på priserna skilde sig mellan bostadsrätter av olika storlekaroch om påverkan skilde sig mellan befintligt bestånd och nyproducerade bostäder. Motivationenbakom amorteringskraven var att reglera och minska hushållens skulder, eftersom de gjorde hushållensårbara för ekonomiska störningar. Det andra amorteringskravet förväntades även sänkabostadspriserna och mottog därför en del kritik. Denna rapport är begränsad till utvecklingen avsmåhus- och bostadsrättspriser mellan december 2013 och februari 2019.De huvudsakliga slutsatserna i denna rapport är att amorteringskraven har minskat förväntade vinster.I tidigare litteratur har makroekonomiska regleringar minskat prisökningen, vilket också är resultatetför denna studie. För småhus och nyproducerade bostäder minskade också priserna jämfört medföregående period. Amorteringskraven har uppnått Finansinspektionens mål om att minska hushållensskulder men har samtidigt ökat skuldkvoten bland hushåll. Avslutningsvis har det blivit svårare förunga hushåll att finansiera sitt bostadsköp då amorteringskraven ökar månadsbetalningarna och gör attde inte klarar av kvar-att-leva-på-kalkylerna hos bankerna. Samtidigt är hyresmarknaden ärsvåråtkomlig och begränsar därmed bostadsalternativen på marknaden.

This thesis analyzes spillover effects of prudential policies on cross-border capital flows in the period from 2000 until 2014 for 64 countries. It estimates the size of the effect, which 9 most common prudential policy tools had on capital flows based on BIS LBS. The findings show spillover effect of general capital requirements and consumer credit capital requirements on the cross-border capital flows. This work provides analysis of spillover effects in several groups of countries with special accent on CEE countries. JEL Classification F32, F34, G21 Keywords Macroprudential policies; Prudential and supervisory measures; Cross-border banking flows; Leakages; Regulatory arbitrage; CEE Author's e-mail ilyshar@gmail.com Supervisor's e-mail adam.gersl@gmail.com

This thesis examines the effectiveness of macroprudential policies on reducing housing price growth in the international database of 56 countries with the use of GMM and fixed effects between 2000 and 2017. The macroprudential index is added to the dynamic panel data model where the housing price index is regressed on housing price determinants as the economic growth or unemployment rate. The analysis is also conducted on the sample of countries with a higher market share of owners with a mortgage as there is a higher opportunity to control the housing market through the credit channel. Nevertheless, results show that we do not have enough evidence to state that macroprudential policies curb house price booms. Contrarily, the effect seems to work in the opposite direction which is probably caused by a reverse causality between the growth of real estate prices and the implementation of macroprudential tools. The debt-to-income restriction is the only tool that decreases housing price growth according to the fixed effects model. Detailed counterfactual analysis of the Czech market proposes only a slight impact of the loan-to-value measure on the apartment price development according to one out of four predictions. 1

This thesis presents three essays on the main determinants and regulations of international capital flows. The essays contribute to an ongoing significant debate among scholars and practitioners on what determines international capital flows by examining the following issues: Global liquidity, market sentiment and financial stability indices; Global liquidity and capital flow regulations; and Global governance and gross capital flows dynamics. In the first essay, we explore the main determinants of global liquidity, measured using cross-border claims of banks, and establish the link between a variety of financial stability indices and global liquidity. For a sample of 149 countries between 2000 and 2016, we find that Bloomberg Financial Stability Indices are more powerful in explaining global liquidity than FRED Financial Stress Indices and the Euro Area Systemic Stress Composite Indicator (CISS). Moreover, both market sentiment indices, namely the US Conference Board Leading Economic Index (LEI) and the US IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index are economically and statistically significant on cross-border bank flows. The research provides useful insights on what market sentiment and financial stability indices are better to employ for financial markets surveillance and as such practice of investment management. We argue that anyone interested in using financial stability indices as indicators of financial conditions and the level of financial stress would benefit from tracking several indices and not just one. The second essay examines the effectiveness of capital controls and macroprudential policies as ways to manage the volume of international capital flows, controlling for other determinants. The findings show that capital controls imposed on inflows generally prevail over controls imposed on outflows in reducing the magnitude of capital flows. The results are consistent with the pecking order theory on capital flows and are connected with the riskiness of different asset classes. For a sample of 112 countries over 2000 and 2016, we find that FX and/or countercyclical reserve (RR_REV) and general countercyclical capital buffer requirements (CTC), reserve requirement ratios (RR) and concentration limits (CONC) are the most effective macroprudential policies for managing countries' exposures to global liquidity fluctuations. Moreover, progress is being made to reduce the systemic risks created by systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) using macroprudential policies. The results reflect recent developments in Basel III regulations and shed light on the effective calibration of capital flow regulations to country-specific circumstances. The final essay examines the link between global governance indicators and patterns of gross capital flows, controlling for other determinants. For a sample of 67 countries between 2000 and 2016, we contribute to explain the existence of the Lucas paradox (1990) on "why doesn't capital flow from rich to poor countries" and the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle (1980). The findings show that institutional quality rather than the effect of diminishing returns of capital is a key explanation for the Lucas paradox. Finally, we provide new evidence on the relationship between the multidimensional nature of financial development and gross capital flows. The findings show the importance and predominance of financial institutions versus financial markets in the dissemination of international capital flows across counties.