infonet-economy

We provide empirical evidence on the heterogeneous transmission of monetary policy to the housing market across and within countries. We use household-level data from Germany, Italy and Switzerland together with the respective monetary policy shocks identified from high-frequency data. We find that the pass-through of monetary policy shocks to rates of newly originated (fixed-rate) mortgages is twice as strong in Switzerland than in Germany and Italy. After an accommodative monetary policy shock, this is associated in the housing market with a larger immediate, and persistent increase of transitions from renting to owning; a stronger decrease in rents; and an increase of the price-rent ratio. Within Italy, we find a stronger pass-through to mortgage rates, housing tenure transitions and the price-rent ratio in the northern regions that have been characterized in the literature as more financially developed than the southern regions.