Can macroprudential policies curb house price booms? International evidence

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.