Brian Peterson is a Senior Policy Advisor in the Financial Stability Department. His primary interests include housing and household finance, macroprudential regulation and the assessment of risks to financial stability. Brian was previously an Assistant Professor at Indiana University. He obtained his PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
We use rich microdata to measure home equity extraction in Canada and track its evolution over time. We find home equity extraction has been rising in recent years and has likely contributed materially to dynamics in household spending.
In this note, we explore two types of risk faced by holders of mortgages and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) in the context of rising interest rates: interest rate risk and renewal risk.
Over the past 15 years, aggregate credit card balances have been increasing, except for a brief spell in the aftermath of the 2007–09 financial crisis. Determining whether the growing balances are due to increased usage of credit cards as a method of payment or whether they reflect increased short-term borrowing is challenging because aggregate balances are snapshots of charges on credit cards before households make their monthly payments.
This paper evaluates the effectiveness of macroprudential policies when regulations are uneven across mortgage lender types. We look at credit tightening that results from macroprudential regulations and examine how much of it is counteracted by credit shifting to unregulated lenders. We also study the impact of monetary policy tightening when some lenders are unregulated.
This paper combines loan-level administrative data with household-level survey data to analyze the impact of recent macroprudential policy changes in Canada using a microsimulation model of mortgage demand of first-time homebuyers.
his paper develops and estimates a model to explain the behaviour of house prices in the United States. The main finding is that over 70% of the increase in house prices relative to trend during the increase of house prices in the United States from 1995 to 2006 can be explained by a pricing mechanism where market participants are ‘Fooled by Search.’
Household debt can be an important source of vulnerability to the financial system. This technical report describes the Household Risk Assessment Model (HRAM) that has been developed at the Bank of Canada to stress test household balance sheets at the individual level.
This article draws on theory and empirical evidence to examine a number of factors behind movements in Canadian house prices. It begins with an overview of the movements in house prices in Canada, using regional data to highlight factors that influence prices over the long run. It then turns to the central theme, that there are medium-run movements in prices not accounted for by long-run factors. Drawing on recent Bank of Canada research, the article discusses several factors behind these medium-run movements, including interest rates, expected price appreciation and market liquidity. The article concludes by identifying areas for future research that would further our understanding of fluctuations in house prices.
