Description


New models for South African consumption, house prices, and mortgage and non-mortgage debt: insights for financial stability and monetary transmission

Abstract: Aggregate consumption typically exceeds 60 per cent of GDP and should be pivotal in central bank policy models. Most have adopted semi-structural macro-models, yet, predominantly, consumption is inadequately specified, based on the simple textbook permanent income form. This paper uses a systems approach to estimate new equations for South African consumption, house prices, mortgage and non-mortgage debt, and income forecasting (to capture income expectations). A credit-augmented consumption function introduces a greater role for uncertainty, varies the spendability of different components of wealth, and includes a key role for credit conditions. The estimated equations provide new insights into the multiple monetary transmission mechanisms, from policy interest rates and credit conditions to aggregate demand, including via non-homogeneous household balance sheet items on consumption. Credit conditions for mortgages and for other debt move quite differently from each other, with implications for consumer spending. Non-mortgage debt covers a larger fraction of total household debt than in advanced market economies, affecting household financial vulnerability. Housing market participants tend to extrapolate recent changes in house prices in forming expectations of capital gains, so positive shocks to housing demand can feed back positively onto house prices and consumption and extend boom conditions. House prices and debt can overshoot relative to their fundamentals, with risks to financial stability. Our new findings should benefit future policy modelling in South Africa.


About the speaker

Professor John Muellbauer is a Senior Research Fellow of Nuffield College, Professor of Economics and a Senior Fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Econometric Society, and a CEPR Research Fellow. He has been a consultant to the World Bank, Bank of England, HM Treasury and the UK Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Board and the IMF and was a Wim Duisenberg Visiting Fellow at the ECB in 2012/13 and a Fellow of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) in 2018/19. His recent research was supported by grants from the Open Society Institute and the Oxford Martin School. He collaborates with economists from the Bank of Canada, Dallas Fed, Banque de France, Bundesbank and ECB on interactions between finance, housing and the real economy focused on the household sector; with Janine Aron on inflation forecasting and exchange rate pass-through, on mobile money for the Gates Foundation, and on mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures in the UK (for the UK’s MHCLG); with Annalisa Cristini and Andrea Geraci on polarisation and inequality in the UK labour market; with John Duca and Anthony Murphy (Dallas Fed), on lessons from the role of housing in the financial crisis, on what drives US house prices, and on the implications of the long-term shift in US credit market architecture. His research, with colleagues, on the impact of credit market liberalization on consumer debt, spending and housing markets in the UK, US, Canada, South Africa and Australia and relative non‐liberalisation in Japan and Germany throws new light on monetary transmission, financial stability and monetary policy. He and Janine Aron are currently assisting the SARB to develop tools and communication strategies for their new financial stability mandate. His most recent paper, “The Future of Macroeconomics”, is a critique of models used by central banks and proposes ways forward. In another 2018 paper, he explains why “the UK housing market is broken” and proposes a comprehensive set of solutions (see a more detailed version).

His 1980 paper with Angus Deaton, “An Almost Ideal Demand System” in the American Economic Review was selected as one of the top twenty papers published in the first one hundred years of that journal. Before coming to Nuffield College in 1981, John was Professor of Economics at Birkbeck College, London, and Lecturer at Warwick University. He obtained his first degree from Cambridge University, England and his Doctorate from the University of California.

Blogs for VOXEU can be found at https://voxeu.org/users/johnmuellbauer0


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