They set loan-to-income (LTI), loan-to-value (LTV) and interest cover ratio policies, with the objective of safeguarding the stability of the financial system. These so-called macro-prudential policy measures are being used increasingly by policy authorities internationally (IMF-FSB-BIS (2016)). The various agents in the model, and their inter-linkages, are shown schematically in Figure 17. 28  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  28  Figure 17: Agents and interactions in the housing market model  Source: Baptista et al (2016). This multi-agent model can be calibrated using micro datasets. This helps ensure agents in the model have characteristics, and exhibit behaviours, which match those of the population at large. For example, the distribution of loan-to-income or loan-to-value ratios on mortgages are calibrated to match the UK population using data on over a million UK mortgages. And the impact on the sale price of a house of it remaining unsold is calibrated to match historical housing transactions data. One of the key benefits of the ABM approach is in providing a framework for drawing together and using, in a consistent way, data from a range of sources to calibrate a model. For example, a variety of data sources were used to calibrate this model, including:   Housing market data: FCA Product Sales Data, Council of Mortgage Lenders, Land Registry and WhenFresh/Zoopla.   Household surveys: English Housing Survey, Living Cost and Food Survey, NMG Household Survey, Wealth and Asset Survey, Survey of Residential Landlords (ARLA) and Private Landlord Survey.

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