Foreign Currency Mortgages and Monetary Policy: A Heterogeneous Bank-Lending Channel

Studying an episode of capital account liberalization and the consequent increase in foreign currency lending practices, we estimate the impact of monetary conditions on banks' mortgage credit supply in domestic and foreign currencies. We establish that monetary changes affect the supply of mortgage credit in volume and in its currency and risk composition, hence we identify a heterogeneous “bank-lending-to-households” channel. While the availability of foreign currency mortgages weakens the domestic bank-lending channel, following a domestic monetary expansion weakly capitalized banks relying on swap transactions lend more to riskier borrowers in the foreign currency suggesting that the presence of foreign currency lending reinforces the risk-taking channel of monetary transmission.