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A central proposition in research on the role of banks in the transmission mechanism is that monetary policy imparts a direct impact on deposits and that deposits act as the driving force of bank lending. This paper argues that the emphasis on policy-induced changes in deposits is misplaced. A reformulation of the bank lending channel is proposed that works primarily through the impact of monetary policy on banks' balance sheet strength and risk perception. Such a recasting implies, contrary to conventional wisdom, that greater reliance on market-based funding enhances the importance of the channel.

We study how monetary policy affects the funding composition of the banking sector. When monetary tightening reduces the supply of retail deposits, banks attempt to substitute wholesale funding for deposit outflows to smooth their lending. Because of financial frictions, banks have varying degrees of access to wholesale funding. Therefore, large banks, or those with greater reliance on wholesale funding, increase their wholesale funding more. Consequently, monetary tightening increases both the reliance on and the concentration of wholesale funding within the banking sector. Our findings also suggest that liquidity requirements could bolster monetary policy transmission through the bank lending channel. This paper was accepted by Tyler Shumway, finance .

The 2007-2010 financial crisis highlighted the central role of financial inter-mediaries' stability in buttressing a smooth transmission of credit to bonowers. While results from the years prior to the crisis often cast doubts on the strength of the bank lending channel, recent evidence shows that bank-specific characteristics can have a large impact on the provision of credit. We show that new factors, such as changes in banks' business models and market finding patterns, had modified the monetary transmission mechanism in Europe and in the US prior to the crisis, and demonstrate the existence of structural changes during period of financial crisis. Banks with weaker core capital positions, greater dependence on market finding and on non-interest sources of income restricted the loan supply more strongly during the crisis period. These findings support the Basel III focus on banks' core capital and on finding liquidity risks. They also call for a more forward-looking approach to the statistical data coverage the banking sector by central banks. In particular, there should be a stronger focus on monitoring those financial factors that are likely to influence the functioning of the monetary transmission mechanism particularly in periods of crisis.

The response of aggregate lending to monetary policy is stronger in state banking markets where financially constrained banks have more market share. On the other hand, there is little difference in the response of state output across the market share financially constrained banks, implying that the aggregate elasticity of output to bank lending is very small, if not zero. I conclude that while small firms might view bank loans as special, they are not special enough for the lending channel to be an important part of how monetary policy works.

We test the bank lending channel of monetary policy in Africa and examine the role of bank cost efficiency in this relationship. We use the stochastic metafrontier approach to estimate cost efficiency scores of 447 commercial banks in Africa. The fixed effect (FE) estimator is used as the baseline estimation method. The 2SLS instrumental variables (IV) and two-step system GMM approaches are used as main estimation techniques to control for endogeneity. The results consistently show the existence of the bank lending channel in Africa: thus, bank credit responds to changes in monetary policy rate. Again, we find strong evidence to show that higher cost efficiency leads to higher loan growth. The results further show that cost-efficient banks are less responsive to monetary policy shocks. The evidence suggests that bank cost efficiency weakens the bank lending channel. This implies that the effect of monetary policy on bank lending depends not only on bank size, capitalization, and liquidity as espoused in the literature but also on bank efficiency. The results are robust in formal sample-splitting. Policy implications are discussed.

This paper identifies a monetary policy channel through the risk pricing of bank debt in the market for jumbo certificates of deposit (jumbo CDs). Adverse policy shocks increase debt holder perceptions of bank default, increasing the risk premia for some banks, thereby decreasing their external funding of loans. The results show that contractionary policy increases the sensitivity of jumbo-CD spreads to leverage and asset risk for small banks, and to leverage for large banks. The results also show a distributional and aggregate effect on banking system jumbo CDs and total loans, producing a risk-pricing (or market discipline) channel. This channel has implications for monetary and regulatory policies, and financial stability.

Purpose>The purpose of this paper is to examine monetary policies and bank lending in the emerging economies of Sub-Sahara Africa.Design/methodology/approach>The dynamic system-generalized method of moments (GMM) that overcomes issues of unobserved period and country-specific effects, as well as potential endogeneity of explanatory variables, is applied in the estimation exercise. The study uses the data for 80 banks across 20 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2010 to 2019.Findings>The findings show that expansionary monetary policy such as an increase in money supply stimulates bank lending, while contractionary monetary policies like increase in the monetary policy rates by the central banks lead to credit contraction, albeit a weak effect due to possible underdevelopment of financial markets, institutional constraints, bank concentration and other rigidities in the system characteristic of developing countries that undermine the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission. Capital adequacy ratio and size of economic activities are other variables that significantly influence bank lending channels.Practical Implication>Sub-Sahara Africa countries can enhance the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission on bank lending through the effective use of the transmission mechanism of changes in money supply and monetary policy rate.Originality/value>While greater empirical attention has been devoted to the nexus between monetary policies and macroeconomic variables in country-specific studies, the connection between monetary policies and bank lending at an extensive regional or cross-country level is still scanty. For Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a palpable lack of empirical evidence on this. This study, therefore, seeks to fill this gap in a region where the impact of monetary policies on credit intermediation is crucial to the economic diversification efforts of the governments of Sub-Sahara Africa.

To what extent does the availability of credit depend on monetary policy? And, does this relationship vary with bank characteristics? Based on a common source of balance sheet data for the four largest economies of the eurozone over the period 1999—2011, we find that the effects of monetary policy on bank lending are significant and heterogeneous in Germany and Italy — which are characterized by a large number of banks — but are weaker and more homogeneous in Spain and France — whose banking industry has a higher degree of market concentration. In particular, monetary policy appears to exert larger effects on cooperative and savings banks with lower liquidity and lesser capital in Germany and savings banks with smaller size in Italy. Our results highlight that the transmission of monetary policy over bank lending in the eurozone is highly heterogeneous. From a policy perspective, the increased large number of cooperative and savings banks, which have had access during the last financial crisis to the refinancing operations of the European Central Bank, bodes well for the improvement of the monetary transmission mechanism. The analysis also suggests that competition policy measures aiming at reducing entry barrier might facilitate the transmission mechanism.

We examine the bank lending channel (BLC) of monetary transmission in a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR). A FAVAR exploits large numbers of macro-economic indicators and allows us to consider an alternative identification of monetary shocks and analyze the lending response of banks at the aggregate and individual levels. We find that the existence of the BLC is more prevalent than previously thought using aggregated lending data, while the lending response of individual banks are driven more by specific innovations than monetary shocks. Nonetheless, the average individual bank response to a monetary shock is consistent with the existence of a BLC.

This paper reviews the monetary transmission mechanism in low-income countries (LICs). We use the standard description of monetary transmission as a benchmark to identify aspects of the transmission mechanism that may operate differently in LICs. In particular, the paper focuses on the effects of financial market structure on monetary transmission. The weak institutional framework prevalent in LICs drastically reduces the role of securities markets. Consequently, traditional monetary transmission through market interest rates and market-determined asset prices are weak or nonexistent. The exchange rate channel, in turn, tends to be undermined by heavy central bank intervention in the foreign exchange market. The weak institutional framework also has the effect of increasing the cost of bank lending to private firms. Coupled with imperfect competition in the banking sector, this induces banks to maintain chronically high excess reserves and to invest in domestic public bonds or (when possible) in foreign bonds. With the financial system not intermediating funds properly, the bank lending channel also becomes impaired. These factors undermine both the strength and reliability of monetary transmission, which has important implications for the conduct of monetary policy in LICs.