Monetary versus Macroprudential Policies Causal Impacts of Interest Rates and Credit Controls in the Era of the UK Radcliffe Report

59 Pages Posted: 23 Aug 2016

See all articles by David Aikman

David Aikman

Bank of England - Monetary Assessment and Strategy Division

Oliver Bush

Bank of England; London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE)

Alan M. Taylor

Columbia University; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

Multiple version iconThere are 3 versions of this paper

Date Written: August 19, 2016

Abstract

We have entered a world of conjoined monetary and macroprudential policies. But can they function smoothly in tandem, and with what effects? Since this policy cocktail has not been seen for decades, the empirical evidence is almost non-existent. We can only fix this shortcoming in a historical laboratory. The Radcliffe Report (1959), notoriously sceptical about the efficacy of monetary policy, embodied views which led the United Kingdom to a three-decade experiment of using credit controls alongside conventional changes in the central bank interest rate. These non-price tools are similar to policies now being considered or used by macroprudential policymakers. We describe these tools, document how they were used by the authorities, and craft a new, largely hand-collected dataset to help estimate their effects. We develop a novel identification strategy, which we term Factor-Augmented Local Projection (FALP), to investigate the subtly different impacts of both monetary and macroprudential policies. Monetary policy acted on output and inflation broadly in line with consensus views today, but credit controls had markedly different effects and acted primarily to modulate bank lending.

Keywords: Monetary policy, macroprudential policy, credit controls

JEL Classification: E50, G18, N14

Suggested Citation

Aikman, David and Bush, Oliver and Bush, Oliver and Taylor, Alan M., Monetary versus Macroprudential Policies Causal Impacts of Interest Rates and Credit Controls in the Era of the UK Radcliffe Report (August 19, 2016). Bank of England Working Paper No. 610, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2827590 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2827590

David Aikman (Contact Author)

Bank of England - Monetary Assessment and Strategy Division ( email )

Threadneedle Street
London EC2R 8AH
United Kingdom

Oliver Bush

Bank of England ( email )

Threadneedle Street
London, EC2R 8AH
United Kingdom

London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) ( email )

Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom

Alan M. Taylor

Columbia University ( email )

3022 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
United States

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

HOME PAGE: http://nber.org

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

London
United Kingdom

HOME PAGE: http://cepr.org

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