Borrower-based Macroprudential Regulation under Coincident Monetary Tightening

In August 2022, the Austrian Financial Market Authority activated the Regulation on Measures to Limit Systemic Risks from Real Estate Financing by Credit Institutions (KIM-V), imposing binding caps on loan-to-value (90 percent), debt service-to-income (40 percent), and loan maturity (35 years) for new housing loans to private households. The measure had been decided in December 2021, when Austrian mortgage rates stood at a record low of about 1.2 percent. It entered into force five days after the European Central Bank's first rate hike took effect and remained in force through the steepest tightening cycle in two decades. The coincidence of the two shocks is both the central identification problem and part of our analysis, because the two policies clearly interact. We estimate the effect of the KIM-V on monthly new housing lending per capita with a synthetic control built from twelve EU comparison countries and show that this counterfactual also tracks the Austrian mortgage rate through the tightening cycle, so that the residual gap can be read net of the rate channel. By January 2024, new lending in Austria is about 104 € per capita, or 46 percent, below the counterfactual. Of the total decline in new lending during the first year of the regulation, roughly two thirds are attributable to the rate shock and one third to the KIM-V. We draw lessons for the coordination of monetary and macroprudential policy.