The Strategic Response of Banks to Macroprudential Policies: Evidence from Mortgage Stress Tests in Canada*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Following the crisis, macroprudential regulations targeting mortgage-market vulnerabilities were widely adopted, their success often relying on the response of financial intermediaries. We provide evidence from Canada suggesting banks may have behaved strategically to limit the effectiveness of recently implemented mortgage stress tests. Before implementation, borrowers had to prove they could make mortgage payments based on the interest rate specified in the contract. The new tests require borrowers to show they can afford payments based on a typically higher qualifying rate, derived from the mode of 5-year rates posted by the six largest banks. The government’s objective was to cool credit markets, but, since many mortgages are government-insured, the big banks’ interests were not aligned. We find evidence of rate manipulation using a difference-in-differences approach comparing changes in spreads for 5-year mortgages with 3-year spreads, unaffected by the policy. The qualifying rates were lowered encouraging continued borrowing, muting the tests’ impact.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".