CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2026
| Author | Aczel, Akos |
|---|---|
| Title | Search Frictions and Policy Interventions in Lending: Evidence from the Hungarian Mortgage Market |
| Summary | This dissertation consists of three self-contained essays on the Hungarian mortgage loan market, contributing to the empirical and theoretical understanding of household finance, consumer protection, and the real effects of credit market policy. Chapter 1 — Price Cap, Search Frictions, and Market Access: Evidence from the Hungarian Housing Loan Market studies the unconventional application of an interest rate cap on new housing loans in Hungary from October 2023 to June 2024. The program increased aggregate consumer surplus by lowering average interest rates and expanding total loan volume, but a sizeable share of the riskiest borrowers lost market access, generating an implicit redistribution from high- to low-risk borrowers. A significant ripple effect in declining interest rates is estimated, and market-boosting effects survived the program’s expiry. These findings are rationalised through a search-friction framework in which the cap served as a transparency tool, signalling the recovery from the European energy crisis to pessimistic borrowers. Chapter 2 — Birds of a Feather Indebted Together: Solutions to the Information Problem in the Case of Mortgage Loans examines peer effects in mortgage borrowing decisions. Borrowers with financially literate colleagues obtain interest rates roughly 0.2 percentage points lower than similar borrowers whose peers have lower financial literacy —a saving equivalent to four to five monthly instalments over the loan term. Peer effects are stronger where bank competition is weaker and for borrowers with low mathematical skills. The introduction of a standardised loan product is shown to offset the peer effect, suggesting that regulation can substitute for informal information channels. Chapter 3 — Liquidity Transfer and the Real Economy during a Crisis: Evidence from a Loan Payment Moratorium analyses the consumption impact of Hungary’s broad-based, unconditional COVID-19 loan payment moratorium. Using a regression discontinuity design with individual-level bank account data, the paper finds that approximately 90% of the liquidity transfer was consumed. The program also reduced the non-performing loan rate by 1.7 percentage points. District-level panel regressions indicate that around 20% of the aggregate extra household liquidity was consumed, with the gap reflecting selection bias absent from the individual-level identification. |
| Supervisor | Ádám Zawadowski |
| Department | Economics PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2026/aczel_akos.pdf |
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