One Monetary Policy and Two Bank Lending Standards: A Tale of Two Europes

What accounts for contrasting economic paths between core and periphery countries in the euro area? Unlike many studies focusing on fiscal problems, we highlight the interplay of bank mortgage lending standards and imbalances created by the common monetary policy framework. To illustrate the mechanism, we derive a country-specific monetary policy stance gap and estimate the panel VAR model of core and periphery countries, respectively. While the widening monetary policy stance gap—the accommodative stance of the ECB given individual economic conditions—induces a similar increase in the demand for mortgage credit in both regions, it is followed by sharply different responses of the supply side of mortgage credit: bank mortgage lending standards are relaxed (tightened) in periphery (core) countries, which can rationalize vastly different paths in mortgage credit, residential investment, and housing prices between the two Europes. In searching for the source of different bank lending behaviors, we find that banks in core countries, where macroprudential policies on mortgage credit are tightened and bank lending margin decreases, increase their cross-border lending to periphery countries, which could fuel excessive risk-taking in periphery countries.