Housing wealth and monetary policy transmission: cross-country evidence

This paper quantifies the role of housing wealth in the transmission of monetary policy to consumption in 20 advanced economies. Using Bayesian VAR models we identify structural shocks with a novel combination of sign and maximum forecast error variance restrictions, isolating the housing wealth channel through counterfactual impulse responses. We find that the housing wealth multiplier — the sensitivity of consumption to exogenous house price changes — is strongly correlated with outright homeownership rates and is higher for durable consumption. Cross-country differences in the monetary policy transmission to consumption are largely driven by the cash-flow channel.