Liberty Street Economics – NY Fed: “Macroprudential policy tools include caps on loan-to-value (LTV) ratios for housing loans, caps on debt service-to-income (DSTI) ratios, and quantitative limits on mortgages. Other tools include time-varying capital requirements (CR), loan loss provisioning (LP), consumer loan limits, and credit growth ceilings. Note that CRs are often implemented by adjusting the risk weights of specific bank asset classes, such as housing or consumer loans. Similarly, LPs involve adjusting provisions either on a general basis or for specific assets such as housing or consumer loans.  We have constructed a novel quarterly macroprudential policy index using data from fifty-seven advanced and emerging economies from 2000 to 2013 (see this recent working paper). The index is built by categorizing a policy action in a given month as a tightening (+1) or an easing (-1) for each of the seven tools listed above. The chart below shows the total number of tightening and easing policy actions for each macroprudential tool over the sample period. The most frequently used tools have been caps on LTV ratios and CRs. Adjustments of other measures such as caps on DSTI ratios, lending restrictions on mortgages, and LPs have also been popular but less frequent. Tightenings have been much more common than easings across all groups, with actions more frequent in emerging economies…”