Mortgages and Monetary Policy∗
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Mortgages and Monetary Policy∗ Carlos Garriga†‡,FinnE.Kydland§ and Roman Sustekˇ ¶ September 4, 2016 Abstract Mortgages are long-term loans with nominal payments. Consequently, under incomplete asset markets, monetary policy can affect housing investment and the economy through the cost of new mortgage borrowing and real payments on outstanding debt. These channels, distinct from traditional real rate channels, are embedded in a general equilibrium model. The transmission mechanism is found to be stronger under adjustable- than fixed-rate mort- gages. Further, monetary policy shocks affecting the level of the nominal yield curve have larger real effects than transitory shocks, affecting its slope. Persistently higher inflation gradually benefits homeowners under FRMs, but hurts them immediately under ARMs. JEL Classification Codes: E32, E52, G21, R21. Keywords: Mortgage contracts, monetary policy, housing investment, redistribution, general equilibrium. ∗We thank John Campbell, Joao Cocco, Morris Davis, Wouter den Haan, Martin Schneider, Javier Villar Burke, Eric Young, and Stan Zin for helpful suggestions and Dean Corbae, Andra Ghent, Matteo Iacoviello, Amir Kermani, Bryan Routledge, and Arlene Wong for insightful conference discussions. We have also benefited from comments by seminar participants at the Bank of England, Birmingham, Carnegie Mellon, CERGE-EI, Essex, Glasgow, IHS Vienna, Indiana, Norwegian School of Economics, Ohio State, Riksbank, Royal Holloway, San Francisco Fed, Southampton, St. Louis Fed, Surrey, and Tsinghua University and par- ticipants at the Bundesbank Workshop on Credit Frictions and the Macroeconomy, LAEF Business CYCLES Conference, LSE Macro Workshop, SAET Meetings (Paris), Sheffield Macro Workshop, NIESR/ESRC The Future of Housing Finance Conference, UBC Summer Finance Conference, the Bank of Canada Monetary Policy and Financial Stability Conference, Housing and the Economy Conference in Berlin, SED (Warsaw), the 2015 MOVE Barcelona Macro Workshop, Monetary Policy and the Distribution of Income and Wealth Conference in St. Louis, the 2015 Wharton Conference on Liquidity and Financial Crisis, and the Monetary Policy with Heterogenous Agents Conference in Paris. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or the Federal Reserve System. †Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; [email protected]. ‡Corresponding author: Carlos Garriga, address: Research Division, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, P.O. Box 442, St. Louis, MO 63166-0442, U.S.A., tel: +1 314 444-7412, fax: +1 314 444-8731, e-mail: [email protected]. §University of California–Santa Barbara and NBER; [email protected]. ¶Queen Mary, University of London and Centre for Macroeconomics; [email protected]. 1 Introduction Mortgages are long-term loans with regular nominal payments, consisting of interest and amortization. The payments are set up so as to guarantee that, given the mortgage interest rate, the principal is gradually repaid in full by the end of the mortgage term, typically 15 to 30 years. A fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) has a fixed nominal interest rate and constant nominal payments, set at origination, for the entire term of the loan; an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), in contrast, sets nominal payments on a period-by-period basis so as, given the current short-term nominal interest rate, the loan is expected to be repaid in full during its remaining term. Various mortgage loans build on these two basic contracts and in most countries, typically, one or the other type dominates.1 While the long-term nominal aspect of mortgages—a form of nominal ‘rigidity’—has been studied in the household finance literature (e.g., Campbell and Cocco, 2003), a formal analysis of its consequences at the aggregate level has been missing (see Campbell, 2013). This is despite the fact that mortgages, in the minds of policy makers, constitute an integral part of a monetary transmission mechanism (e.g., Bernanke and Gertler, 1995; Bernanke, 2007; Mishkin, 2007). In major economies, already the size of mortgage finance would suggest that its role in the monetary transmission mechanism must be important. Mortgage payments are equivalent to 15-22% of homeowners’ pre-tax income in the U.S. (average for the past 30-40 years); 15-20% in the U.K. (Hancock and Wood, 2004); 27% in Germany (European Mortgage Federation, 2012b); 36.5% in Denmark (first-time homeowners; European Mortgage Federation, 2012c); and 30% in France (first-time homeowners; European Mortgage Federation, 2009). And the 1Countries in which FRMs—with interest rates fixed for at least 10 years—have traditionally dom- inated the mortgage market include Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, and the United States; in most other countries, either ARMs or FRMs with interest rates fixed for less than 5 years prevail; see Scanlon and Whitehead (2004)andEuropean Mortgage Federation (2012a). Research is still inconclusive on the causes of the cross-country heterogeneity, but likely reasons include government policies, historical path dependence, sources of mortgage funding (capital markets vs. bank deposits), and inflation experience; see Miles (2004), Green and Wachter (2005), and Campbell (2013). Countries also differ in terms of prepay- ment penalties, costs of refinancing, recourse, prevalence of teaser rates, the frequency of ARM resets, and the ARM reference rate. Our analysis abstracts from these details. mortgage debt to (annual) GDP ratio in developed economies has reached on average 70% in 2009, although there is a large cross-country variation (International Monetary Fund, 2011, Chapter 3). In some countries outstanding mortgage debt is even larger than government debt and its maturity is longer.2 In light of these facts, this paper provides a conceptual and quantitative analysis of the role of the long-term nominal nature of mortgages in the monetary transmission mechanism at the aggregate level. In order to accommodate the mortgage market structure of different countries, both FRM and ARM contracts are studied. First, in a simple partial equilibrium setup, the paper describes the channels through which mortgage contracts transmit nominal shocks to the real economy. These channels are then embedded in a calibrated general equilibrium model. The purpose of this exercise is to impose general equilibrium discipline on the problem, given its aggregate context, and assess the quantitative importance of the mechanism. To keep the analysis transparent, we abstract from all other nominal rigidities (sticky prices, wages), as well as other channels through which housing finance affects the macroeconomy (e.g., default or the role of home equity lines of credit in providing liquidity). The transmission mechanism is studied in an environment in which homeowners do not trade a full set of state-contingent securities with mortgage investors. Consequently, the effective discount factors of the two agent types are not equalized state by state and risk sharing is limited. In this setup, we identify two channels through which mortgage con- tracts transmit nominal shocks into the real economy. Both channels are distinct from the traditional real rate channel of monetary policy transmission.3 One channel works through the cost of new mortgage loans (‘price effect’). In essence, it is a dynamic version of the tilt effect, previously studied in static settings (e.g., Schwab, 1982). Expected future inflation, transmitted into nominal mortgage interest rates, redistributes real mortgage payments over the life of the loan so as to leave mortgage investors indifferent 2Hilscher, Raviv, and Reis (2014) document that in the United States government debt has predominantly short-term maturity. 3The real rate channel, whereby the central bank directly affects the ex-ante short-term real interest rate, is described by, e.g., Bernanke and Gertler (1995). In our model, the real interest rate responds to monetary policy shocks only indirectly through general equilibrium effects. 2 between new mortgages and other assets. If this results in real payments increasing in periods/states in which income has high value to homeowners, the effective cost of the mortgage to homeowners increases. This effect is qualitatively the same under both FRM and ARM. The other channel works through the effects of inflation on the real value of mortgage payments of outstanding debt (‘income effect’).4 Under incomplete asset markets, the nom- inal nature of mortgages translates inflation shocks into shocks to real disposable income. This channel is qualitatively different under the two contracts. Under FRM, higher inflation reduces real mortgage payments; under ARM, higher inflation increases real mortgage pay- ments, if it sufficiently transmits into higher nominal interest rates. Under FRM, the effects grow gradually over time through accumulated inflation; under ARM they are immediate and resemble the effects of an increase in the real interest rate, even when the real rate itself does not change. The general equilibrium model, which embeds the two channels, consists of homeowners and capital owners/mortgage investors. There is a representative agent of each type. Such a coarse split of the population is motivated by Campbell and Cocco (2003): in the data, the 3rd and 4th quintiles of the wealth distribution represent typical homeowners; the 5th quintile represents capital owners.5 As an approximation to the characteristics in the data, homeowners in the model derive income from labor and invest in housing capital,