Competition among banks and the pass-through of monetary policy

This paper introduces monopolistically competitive financial intermediaries into the New Keynesian DSGE setting. Modelling bank market power explicitly contributes to understanding two empirical facts: (i) The short-run transmission of changes in money market rates to bank retail rates is far from complete and heterogeneous. (ii) Stiffer competition among commercial banks implies that loan rates correlate more tightly with the policy rate. In my model, the degree of monopolistic competition in the banking sector has a sizeable impact on the pass-through of changes in the policy rate. In particular, a more competitive market for bank credit amplifies the efficiency of monetary policy.     

Financial market imperfections and monetary policy strategy

In a model with imperfect money, credit and reserve markets, we examine if an inflation-targeting central bank applying the funds rate operating procedure to indirectly control market interest rates also needs a monetary aggregate as policy instrument. We show that if private agents use information extracted from money and financial markets to form inflation expectations and if interest rate pass-through is incomplete, the central bank can use a narrow monetary aggregate and the discount interest rate as independent and complementary policy instruments to reinforce the credibility of its announcements and the role of inflation target as a nominal anchor for inflation expectations. This study shows how a monetary policy strategy combining inflation targeting and monetary targeting can be conceived to guarantee macroeconomic stability and the credibility of monetary policy. Friedman's k-percent money growth rule, which can generate dynamic instability, and two alternative stabilizing feedback monetary targeting rules are examined.     

MICROECONOMIC FOUNDATION OF LENDER OF LAST RESORT FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF PAYMENTS*

We construct a model to clarify the mechanism by which the lender of last resort (LLR) can prevent bank runs. In our model, a bank has both the function of facilitating payments in which inside money is settled using outside money and the function of financial intermediation using a deposit contract. The deposit contract might lead to a bank run, and might even contribute to an efficient allocation. Therefore, to consider the liquidity supply by the LLR, we introduce the deposit contract as a factor of instability in the banking model. We show that the LLR can assist in the recovery of both the efficiency and stability of the financial system.     

Liquidity risk and financial competition: Implications for asset prices and monetary policy

This paper studies the implications of banking competition for capital markets and monetary policy. In particular, I develop a two-sector monetary growth model in which a group of agents is exposed to liquidity shocks and money is essential. Banks insure depositors against such risk and invest in the economy's assets. In this setting, I compare an economy with a perfectly competitive banking sector to an economy with a fully concentrated financial sector. Unlike previous work, banks can have market power in both deposits and capital markets. Compared to a perfectly competitive financial sector, I demonstrate that a monopolistic banking system can have substantial adverse consequences on capital formation, assets prices, and the degree of risk sharing. Furthermore, multiple steady-states can emerge and the economy becomes subject to poverty traps. More importantly, market power in financial markets may overturn the Tobin effect present under a perfectly competitive financial sector. This necessarily happens in economies with high degrees of liquidity risk and low levels of capital formation.     

Liquidity risk, economic development, and the effects of monetary policy

Empirical evidence indicates that monetary policy is not super-neutral in many countries. In particular, in high inflation economies, inflation is negatively related to economic activity. By comparison, inflation may be positively correlated with output in low inflation countries. We present a neoclassical growth model with money in which the incidence of liquidity risk is inversely related to aggregate capital formation. Interestingly, there may be multiple monetary steady-states where the effects of monetary policy vary. In poor economies, the financial system is highly distorted and higher rates of money growth are associated with less capital formation. In contrast, in advanced economies, a Tobin effect is observed. Since inflation exacerbates distortions from a coordination failure in the low-capital steady-state, individuals become much more exposed to liquidity risk. Consequently, optimal monetary policy depends on the level of development.     

Credit creation under multiple banking regulations: The impact of balance sheet diversity on money supply

Since the recent financial crisis along with more concentration of banking supervision, we have stepped into a new regulatory regime where multiple regulations are at play simultaneously. In this paper, we study the collective impacts of multiple regulations on credit creation in a heterogeneous banking system. Each single regulation imposes a constraint on credit creation for each bank, while with multiple regulations, only the most stringent one plays the determinant role on money supply. For the homogeneous banking system with identical balance sheets, they share the same binding regulation. In contrast, for the heterogeneous banking system with diverse balance sheets, the binding regulation for each bank may be different from other's. Those banks, who are bound by different regulatory constraints from homogeneous banks, would bring about an overall reduction in money supply, because those binding regulations impose a lower capacity (compared with the one in the case of homogeneous banks) for the banks to extend their balance sheets in this condition. We put forward an agent-based model of commercial banks integrated with two processes: credit creation and fund transfer, to demonstrate the reduction effect. The results facilitate the understandings of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy via banks and its interaction with prudential regulations.     

Private money and bank runs

Abstract This paper studies bank runs in a model with private money. We show that allowing claims on demand deposits to circulate as a medium of exchange can help prevent bank runs. In our model, there exists a unique banking equilibrium where no one demands early withdrawals of real goods and agents in need of liquidity use private money to finance consumption. With private money, the unique equilibrium not only eliminates bank runs but also improves banking efficiency. The implications of our model are consistent with the evidence from the banking history of the United States.     

Structural breaks in the lending interest rate pass-through and the euro

This paper investigates whether size and speed of the pass-through of market rates into short term business lending rates have increased in the wake of the introduction of the euro. Allowing for multiple unknown structural breaks we find two in four EMU countries, and in the UK as well, and a single one in five other countries. The pattern of dates fits national banking systems adjusting slowly to the new monetary regime and suggests caution in associating structural changes to the introduction of the euro. The estimated equilibrium pass-through in the last break-free period is on average more incomplete, hinting at a reduced effectiveness of the single monetary policy. These results run against the economic intuition that a reduced volatility in money market rates is bound to mitigate uncertainty and to ease therefore the transfer of policy rate changes to retail rates; the run-up to Basel 2 and a deterioration of competition in loan markets could be the motivations. Caution in extrapolating these findings to recent periods is suggested by the differences between the unharmonized and the new harmonized retail rates.     

银行业的竞争对企业外部融资的影响——基于中国制造业的分析

本文分析了我国银行业竞争程度对制造业外部融资行为以及制造业本身发展的影响,并据此判断银行业竞争程度的动态变化对我国经济发展的影响。首先,通过Panzar-Rosse模型测度了1998～2008年间我国银行业市场的竞争程度,结果表明,我国银行业市场竞争度在样本期内呈现出上升的趋势;其次,运用OLS方法分析了银行业市场竞争度对不同外部融资依赖程度的制造业部门的影响,结果发现,银行业市场竞争度的上升为制造业的外部融资行为提供了便利,有利于外部融资依赖度较高类型的制造业部门的发展。因此,本文得出的结论为,银行业竞争程度的上升促进了制造业的发展和经济增长。     

Money Market Uncertainty and Retail Interest Rate Fluctuations: A Cross-Country Comparison

Abstract. This paper analyzes empirically the relationship between money market uncertainty and unexpected deviations in retail interest rates in a sample of ten OECD countries. We find that, with the exception of the United States, money market uncertainty has only a modest impact on the conditional volatility of retail interest rates. Even for the United States, we find that the effects of money market uncertainty are spread out over time. Our results also indicate that money market uncertainty tends to be passed on to retail rates to a lesser extent in countries where banking relationships play a substantial role.     

Did the global financial crisis alter the competitive conditions in the Indian banking industry?

This article addresses a pertinent research question: Did the global financial crisis alter the competitive conditions in the Indian banking industry? In order to find the answer of this research question, we applied a dynamic version of the non-structural Panzar-Rosse model on a unique unbalanced panel dataset of Indian banks spanning over the period from 1998/99 to 2015/16. The robust estimates of H-statistic computed on the basis of the generalized method of moments estimates of the elasticities of input prices show that (i) Indian banks earned their interest and total revenue under monopolistic competition throughout the whole of the sample period and (ii) the global financial crisis altered the competitive conditions in the banking industry, and market moved closer to perfect competition following the financial crisis, especially when interest-bearing activities were in focus.     

A two-pillar DSGE monetary policy model for the euro area

The current financial crisis has revived the interest for monitoring both monetary and credit developments. Over the past two decades, consistent with the adoption of inflation targeting strategies by a growing number of central banks and the development of New Keynesian models for which monetary aggregates are largely irrelevant, money and credit have been progressively neglected in the conduct of monetary policy. A striking exception has been the Eurosystem, which has implemented a strategy known as the “two-pillar monetary policy strategy” giving a prominent role for money. In this paper, we develop a small optimizing model based on Ireland (2004), estimated on euro area data and featuring this two-pillar strategy. We evaluate an ECB-style cross-checking policy rule in a DSGE model with real balance effects of money. We find some evidence that indeed money plays a non-trivial role in explaining the euro area business cycle. This provides a rationale for the central bank to factor in monetary developments but also raises some issues regarding the reliability of M3 as an appropriate monetary indicator. We find some evidence that the ECB has systematically reacted to a filtered measure of money growth but weak evidence it has reacted more aggressively during excess money growth periods.     

Capital market imperfections in a monetary growth model

Summary. We consider a monetary growth model essentially identical to that of Diamond (1965) and Tirole (1985), except that we explicitly model credit markets, a credit market friction, and an allocative function for financial intermediaries. These changes yield substantially different results than those obtained in more standard models. In particular, if any monetary steady state equilibria exist, there are generally two of them; one of these has a low capital stock and output level, and it is necessarily a saddle. The other steady state has a high capital stock and output level; either it is necessarily a sink, or its stability properties depend on the rate of money creation. It follows that monetary equilibria can be indeterminate, and nonconvergence phenomena can be observed. Increases in the rate of money creation reduce the capital stock in the high-capital-stock steady state. If the high-capital-stock steady state is not a sink for all rates of money growth, then increases in the rate of money growth can induce a Hopf bifurcation. Hence dynamical equilibria can display damped oscillation as a steady state equilibrium is approached, and limit cycles can be observed as well. In addition, in the latter case, high enough rates of inflation induce the kinds of “crises” noted by Bruno and Easterly (1995): when inflation is too high there are no equilibrium paths approaching the high-activity steady state. Received: November 18, 1995; revised version: March 26, 1996     

Financial development and financial openness nexus: the precondition of banking competition

We examine the dynamic relationship between financial development and financial openness using the pooled mean group estimator developed by Pesaran et al. (1999). Our results show that financial openness has a positive effect on financial development in the long run, but may have a negative effect in the short run. Using estimates of country-specific short-run coefficients, we also find that the adverse short-run effects of financial openness are associated with a lower degree of banking competition. The system GMM estimator also supports these findings, suggesting that the financial development and financial openness nexus is contingent on the degree of banking competition. A key policy implication is that a higher degree of banking competition is a precondition for financial openness to promote financial development.     

The Interaction of Financial Fragility and the Business Cycle in Determining Banks’ Loan Losses: An Investigation of the Italian Case

The Basel II capital accord and the recent crises have fostered the debate over the financial stability of the aggregate banking sector. Because loan losses are an important factor for banking stability, this paper aims to gauge the impact of real and financial fragility on default losses of Italian banks. To this end the ratio of non‐performing loans to total loans is regressed on the business cycle and indebtedness. In addition, to capture the joint effect of real and financial fragility, the analysis considers an interaction term, which to our knowledge has never been applied before to Italian default data. Based on the interaction model, results show that the actual impact of financial fragility on default losses depends not only on the business cycle phase but also on the firm's size, whereby in adverse economic conditions, small firms are more significantly affected by financial fragility.     

Market‐Based Measures of Monetary Policy Expectations and Their Evolution Since the Introduction of the Euro

The paper considers the relation between monetary policy expectations and financial markets in the case of Europe. A number of money market instruments are compared, with the result that the 1‐month forward interest rates extracted from the Libor yield curve has the best prediction power of the future monetary policy path. These forward rates have been used to study the evolution of market expectations regarding the monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB). The sharp increases and the following decreases in interest rates during 2000–2001 have reduced the predictive power of money market instruments, but smoother management of interest rates and better communication from the ECB has helped to improve the forecasting power of money market instruments.     

中国银行业高利润的来源:市场势力还是高效率

中国银行业的高利润究竟来源于行政垄断保护下的市场势力溢价,还是应对未来金融开放环境下的激烈竞争进行改革带来经营效率的提高,抑或是整体经济稳定增长的结果?通过对银行业系统市场势力和经营效率测度发现,银行业整体存在着较高的系统性市场势力溢价,且规模弹性小于1;银行业整体效率低下,全要素生产率平均增长为负值;银行业的高利润主要来源于行政垄断造成的行业系统性市场势力,而非因改革带来的效率提高,GDP的增长一定程度上促成了银行业的高利润。     

Democracy,regulation and competition in emerging banking systems

This paper develops a political economy framework to analyse the relations among democracy, financial regulation and banking competition in the emerging banking systems of Central and Eastern Europe. We develop extensive new yearly non-structural indices of bank competition instead of concentration indices as in the previous literature that show its evolution over time with the level of democracy. In addition, we directly test for linkages between democracy, financial regulation and banking competition. Using an unbalanced panel data set over the period 1994–2016 for 617 banks, we show that more democratic countries with better regulatory framework lead to the enhancement of competition. We also find significant support for the core hypothesis that financial regulatory framework in a “partially” democratic environment is inadequate. Given that financial regulatory framework in a “partially” democratic environment can be inadequate we find a U-shaped relation in the sense that there is a threshold level of democracy beyond which banking systems in those countries are more competitive.     

Liberalization,Regulatory Delays and Vulnerability to Systemic Banking Crisis

This work aims at contributing to the improvement of the early warning systems of banking crises using a new approach accounting for model uncertainty. We show that a multinomial logit model based on Bayesian model averaging (BMA) is a good strategy to predict banking crisis. To do this, we argue that differences in vulnerability to banking crisis can be largely explained by an asymmetry between financial market evolution and regulation update on a sample of 49 developed and developing countries between 1980 and 2010. When markets are liberalized, competition pushes bankers to take more risks and take advantage of regulatory delays thus increasing crises probabilities. Our empirical evidence supports that crisis probability is higher in country liberalizing their banking system when regulation is not updated. We developed an early warning system for systemic banking crises based on the multinomial logit model. Its main difference to existing prediction models and its contribution to the literature is that it is intended to identify and resolve what is called by Bussiere and Fratzscher [(2006). Towards a new early warning system of financial crises. Journal of International Money and Finance, 25(6), 953–973] as post-crisis bias in binomial models and to develop a new methodology of leading indicators selection based on BMA. Overall, our model predicts all banking crises during our sample period.     

Re-examining the financial development and economic growth nexus in Kenya

This paper re-examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in Kenya for the period 1966–2005 within a quadvariate vector autoregressive (VAR) framework by including exports and imports as additional variables to the finance–economic growth nexus. We use four conventionally accepted proxies for financial development, namely money supply (M2), liquid liabilities (M3), domestic bank credit to the private sector and total domestic credit provided by the banking sector (all percent of GDP). Applying a modified version of the Granger causality test due to Toda and Yamamoto [Toda, H.Y. and Yamamoto, T., Statistical inference in vector autoregressions with possibly integrated process. Journal of Econometrics 1995; 66; 225–250], our empirical results suggest that in three out of the four measures of financial development we found evidence of a two-way Granger causality: (1) between domestic credit provided by the banking sector and economic growth; (2) between total domestic credit provided by the banking sector and economic growth, and (3) between liquid liabilities and economic growth. This implies that neither the supply-leading nor the demand-following hypotheses are supported in Kenya and that economic growth and financial development are jointly determined, or they complement each other. A major implication of our finding is that financial development promotes economic growth in Kenya and that policies at enhancing the development of the financial sector can help to spur economic growth.