Preventing financial disasters: Macroprudential policy and financial crises

The ultimate goal of macroprudential policy is to prevent and reduce the costs of systemic financial crises, and thus contribute to promoting sustainable economic growth. However, despite the active role played by such policies in recent decades, there is still limited empirical evidence regarding whether prudential regulation is effective to enhance financial stability by preventing and mitigating crisis risk. This paper seeks to close that gap by studying the relationship between macroprudential policy and both the likelihood and severity of financial crises. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, I show that macroprudential policy tightenings are successful at reducing the frequency of systemic financial crises. Moreover, this result holds even if macroprudential policies are implemented when the economy is already experiencing a financial boom or when monetary conditions are rather accommodative. I point to the prevention and mitigation of financial booms as the main transmission mechanism through which macroprudential policy defuses crisis risk. Second, I find that macroprudential policy enhances the resilience of the financial system, by dampening the output losses associated with future systemic financial crises. The latter result implies that macroprudential policy not only makes financial crises less likely, but also less painful.