Monetary Policy when Households have Debt: New Evidence on the Transmission Mechanism

This paper offers a new perspective on the transmission of monetary policy using household data for the U.S. and U.K. Following a temporary cut in interest rates, households with mortgage debt increase their spending significantly, home-owners without debt do not adjust expenditure at all and renters increase spending but by less than mortgagors. Income, however, rises considerably for all households. We show that the balance sheets of these housing tenure groups differ markedly in their composition of liquid versus illiquid wealth. This heterogeneity in liquidity holdings, together with a sizable general equilibrium effect on income, is crucial for explaining our results. In contrast, differences in demographics, the elasticity of intertemporal substitution, wealth effects and the response of mortgage and rental payments are unable to account for the heterogeneity in expenditure we document