Chapter 1: The Bank of Mom and Dad: Intergenerational Transfers and Macroprudential Regulation

I study how parental transfers shape first-home purchases and the incidence of borrower-based policy in Sweden. Linking deed-level parental mortgage extractions to children’s first-home transactions, I construct a high-frequency proxy for down-payment support at origination. Buyers with parental support purchase more expensive homes, enter with lower loan-to-value ratios, and display higher debt-to-income ratios. Exploiting the 2010 loan-to-value cap, I show that households with parental support sustained purchasing power while keeping leverage close to the cap, consistent with a shift from collateral toward payment constraints. A shift-share design further shows that parental house-price gains increase the supply of such support.

Chapter 2: Housing Collateral, Macroprudential Policies, and Corporate Investment

This paper studies whether borrower-based mortgage regulation transmits to real activity through the balance sheets of firm owners. Using an owner-firm matched panel for Sweden, I link controlling households to their closely held firms and exploit the staggered introduction of borrower-based measures during 2010–2018. I find that firms whose owners are exposed to these regulations reduce fixed investment growth persistently relative to an unexposed control group. The decline is economically meaningful at the firm level and is concentrated to the amortization requirements introduced in 2016 and 2018. On the household side, exposed owners reduce home equity extractions after the reforms. On the firm side, the investment response is strongest among firms that appear more exposed to financing frictions, while firms with more collateral are comparatively insulated. A complementary cross-country event study for advanced economies shows a similar pattern of declining private investment growth following borrower-based tightenings.

Chapter 3: From Monetary Policy to Household Demand: The Role of Housing Transactions

We study whether housing transactions are an important monetary policy transmission channel. Using Swedish administrative data that combine household registers with universe-level information on housing and car transactions, we document three results. First, contractionary monetary policy shocks reduce both durable expenditure and housing-market activity: a 25 basis point tightening lowers durable spending by about 5% after eight quarters, with cars and home-related goods accounting for the bulk of the durable response, and reduces housing transactions by about 4% within a year. Second, at the household level, housing transactions coincide with large increases in durable spending. Third, a decomposition of aggregate impulse responses implies that the decline in housing transactions accounts for about 10–15% of the total fall in durable expenditure after a monetary tightening. The evidence suggests that housing turnover is a quantitatively meaningful propagation margin within the housing channel of monetary policy.