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Collateral constraints widely used in models of financial crises feature a pecuniary externality: Agents do not internalize how borrowing decisions made in “good times” affect collateral prices during a crisis. We show that under commitment the optimal financial regulator’s plans are time inconsistent and study time-consistent policy. Quantitatively, this policy reduces sharply the frequency and magnitude of crises, removes fat tails from the distribution of asset returns, and increases social welfare. In contrast, constant debt taxes are ineffective and can be welfare reducing, while an optimized “macroprudential Taylor rule” is effective but less so than the optimal time-consistent policy.

We investigate the role of macroprudential policies in mitigating liquidity traps. When constrained households engage in deleveraging, the interest rate needs to fall to induce unconstrained households to pick up the decline in aggregate demand. If the fall in the interest rate is limited by the zero lower bound, aggregate demand is insufficient and the economy enters a liquidity trap. In this environment, households' ex ante leverage and insurance decisions are associated with aggregate demand externalities. Welfare can be improved with macroprudential policies targeted toward reducing leverage. Interest rate policy is inferior to macroprudential policies in dealing with excessive leverage.

We propose a theory of monetary policy and macroprudential interventions in financial markets. We focus on economies with nominal rigidities in goods and labor markets and subject to constraints on monetary policy, such as the zero lower bound or fixed exchange rates. We identify an aggregate demand externality that can be corrected by macroprudential interventions in financial markets. Ex post, the distribution of wealth across agents affects aggregate demand and output. Ex ante, however, these effects are not internalized in private financial decisions. We provide a simple formula for the required financial interventions that depends on a small number of measurable sufficient statistics. We also characterize optimal monetary policy. We extend our framework to incorporate pecuniary externalities, providing a unified approach to both externalities. Finally, we provide a number of applications which illustrate the relevance of our theory.

Credit cycles have been a characteristic of advanced economies for over 100 years. On average, a sustained pick-up in the ratio of credit to GDP has been highly correlated with banking crises. The boom phases of the cycle are characterised by large deviations in credit from trend. A range of mechanisms can generate these effects, each of which has strategic complementarity between banks at its core. Macro-prudential policy could curb these credit cycles, both through raising the cost of maintaining risky portfolios and through an expectations channel that operates via banks' perceptions of other banks' actions.

How should macroprudential policy be designed when policymakers also have access to liquidity provision tools to manage crises? We show in a tractable model of systemic banking risk that there are three factors at play: first, ex post liquidity provision mitigates financial crises, and this reduces the need for macroprudential policy. In the extreme, if liquidity provision is untargeted and costless or if it completely forestalls crises by credible out-of-equilibrium lending-of-last-resort, there is no role left for macroprudential regulation. Second, however, macroprudential policy needs to consider the ex ante incentive effects of targeted liquidity provision. Third, if shadow banking reduces the effectiveness of macroprudential instruments, it is optimal to commit to less generous liquidity provision as a second-best substitute for macroprudential policy.

This study examines the tax avoidance behavior of firms prior to the issuance, and following the resolution, of SEC tax comment letters. We find that firms that appear to engage in greater tax avoidance are more likely to receive a tax-related SEC comment letter. We also find that firms receiving a tax-related SEC comment letter, relative to firms receiving a non-tax comment letter, subsequently decrease their tax avoidance behavior consistent with an increase in expected tax costs. Additionally, we document evidence consistent with other firms that do not receive a comment letter reacting to multiple publicly disclosed tax-related comment letters within their industry by lowering their reported GAAP ETR, consistent with an indirect effect of regulatory scrutiny on certain types of tax avoidance.

This article studies how credit markets respond to policy constraints on household leverage. Exploiting a sharp policy-induced discontinuity in the cost of originating certain high-leverage mortgages, we study how the Dodd–Frank “Ability-to-Repay” rule affected the price and availability of credit in the U.S. mortgage market. Our estimates show that the policy had only moderate effects on prices, increasing interest rates on affected loans by 10–15 basis points. The effect on quantities, however, was significantly larger; we estimate that the policy eliminated 15% of the affected market completely and reduced leverage for another 20% of remaining borrowers. This reduction in quantities is much greater thanwould be implied by plausible demand elasticities and indicates that lenders responded to the policy not only by raising prices but also by exiting the regulated portion of the market. Heterogeneity in the quantity response across lenders suggests that agency costs may have been one particularly important market friction contributing to the large overall effect as the fall in lending was substantially larger among lenders relying on third-parties to originate loans. Finally, while the policy succeeded in reducing leverage, our estimates suggest this effect would have only slightly reduced aggregate default rates during the housing crisis.

The literature on the effectiveness of macroprudential policy tools is still in its infancy and has so far provided only limited guidance for policy decisions. In recent years, however, increasing efforts have been made to fill this gap. Progress has been made in embedding macroprudential policy in theoretical models. There is increasing empirical work on the effect of some macroprudential tools on a range of target variables, such as quantities and prices of credit, asset prices, and on the amplitude of the financial cycle and financial stability. In this paper we provide a critical review of recent progress in theoretical and empirical research on the effectiveness of macroprudential instruments.

Macroprudential policy is increasingly being implementedworldwide, and is mostly applied to banks. A key question is whether this prompts substitution toward nonbank credit. Using two different global data sets on macroprudential measures and different methodologies, including detrended series, panel estimations, and propensity score matching, we find evidence of such substitution. Substitution toward nonbank credit appears to be strongerwhen policy measures are binding and are implemented in economies with well-developed nonbank credit markets. This substitution partially offsets the fall in bank credit, thus dampening the policies’ effect on total credit.