Beyond emissions: the interplay of macroprudential regulation and climate policy

Francesca Diluiso, Barbara Annicchiarico and Marco Carli

While climate change is often seen as a long-term concern, climate mitigation policies can have different short-term effects, since they affect the transmission mechanism of conventional macroeconomic shocks. In a new working paper, we show that cap-and-trade schemes lead to lower volatility in GDP and financial variables, and result in reduced welfare costs of the business cycle, when compared to the more widely known carbon taxes. As we find that these welfare differences are primarily driven by distortions in financial markets, we argue that countercyclical macroprudential regulation, even without any green-biased component, can effectively align the welfare performance of these policies and mitigate their short-run costs.

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Do large and small banks need different prudential rules?

Austen Saunders and Matthew Willison

Banks come in different shapes and sizes. Do prudential regulations that work well for big banks work as well for small ones? To help us find out, we measure the effectiveness of some key regulatory ratios as predictors of bank failure. We do so using ‘receiver operating characteristic’ – or ‘ROC’ – analysis of simple threshold rules. When we do this, we find that we can use the ratios we test to make better predictions for large banks than for small ones. This provides evidence that an efficient set of regulations for large banks might not be as efficient for small ones.

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The Spanish Connection – Consequences of a macroprudential regulation in Spain on Mexico

Jagdish Tripathy

Does macroprudential regulation spillover to foreign financial systems through inter-bank linkages? This question has received a lot of attention in recent years given the discord between the international nature of the global financial system and its regulation and supervision by national jurisdictions (e.g. this article). For example, subsidiaries of Spanish banks issue almost half of all credit issued by commercial banks in Mexico. These subsidiaries are also fully owned by their parent banks headquartered in Spain. Therefore, it is quite natural to ask whether macroprudential regulations in Spain can have unintended consequences on the Mexican financial system and the Mexican economy in general. While Mexican subsidiaries of Spanish banks are de-jure ring-fenced from regulations in Spain, does this hold de-facto?

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