Macroprudential Regulation and Macroeconomic Activity

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to examine the impact of macroprudential regulation on bank’s financial decisions and the implications for the real sector. I explicitly incorporate costs and benefits of capital requirements. I model an occasionally binding capital constraint and approximate it using an asymmetric non linear penalty function. This friction means that the banks refrain from valuable lending. At the same time, countercyclical buffers provide structural stability to the financial system. I show that higher capital requirements can dampen the business cycle fluctuations. I also show that stronger regulation can induce banks to hold buffers and hence mitigate an economic downturn as well. Increasing the capital requirements do not seem to have an adverse effect on the welfare. Lastly, I also show that switching to a countercyclical capital requirement regime can help reduce fluctuations and raise welfare.