Mending the Broken Link: Heterogeneous Bank Lending and Monetary Policy Pass-Through
54 Pages Posted: 24 Oct 2016
Date Written: October 2016
Abstract
We analyse the pass-through of monetary policy measures to lending rates to firms and households in the euro area using a unique bank-level dataset. Banks' characteristics such as the capital ratio and the exposure to sovereign debt are responsible for the heterogeneity of pass-through of conventional monetary policy changes. The location of a bank is instead irrelevant. Non-standard measures normalized the capacity of banks to grant loans resulting in a significant compression in lending rates. Banks with a high level of non-performing loans and a low capital ratio were the most responsive to the measures. Finally, we quantify the effects of non-standard policies on the real economic activity using a standard macroeconomic model and find that in absence of these measures both inflation and output gap would have been significantly lower.
Keywords: European Banks, Heterogeneity, Monetary pass-through, VARs
JEL Classification: C23, E44, E52, G21
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