Capital flow management and monetary policy to control credit growth

Abstract

This paper examines whether capital flow management and monetary policies effectively reduce credit growth in emerging market economies in the presence of both conventional and unconventional monetary policy actions undertaken by advanced economies. We apply a dynamic panel model with fixed effects to a sample of 21 emerging market economies from 2000 to 2020 using quarterly data and more continuous variables than in other studies rather than limiting the variability using proxies. We find that capital controls and macroprudential regulation, as tools of capital flow management policy, moderate credit growth. This effect is particularly shown in countries with tighter monetary conditions. Our main findings highlight the useful role of coordinating capital flow management and monetary policies. This role stands for both fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes. Lastly, we find capital flow management and monetary policies manage to control credit in normal periods, but their coordination is less effective during crises and high volatility periods. Robustness checks suggest that these findings are stable across alternative proxies used in the literature, thus providing additional support for the validity of our results.