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After the global financial crisis, policy rates were cut to near-zero levels, yet, bank lending rates did not fall as much as the decline in policy rates would have suggested. If the crisis represents a structural break in the relationship between monetary policy and lending rates, how should central banks view the post-crisis transmission? This poses a major puzzle for monetary policymakers. Using a new weighted average cost of liabilities to measure banks’ effective funding costs we show a model of interest rate pass-through with dynamic panel data methods solves this puzzle, and has many other advantages over traditional approaches. It confirms central banks should focus on the cost and composition of bank liabilities, as many are now doing, to better understand and steer the dynamics of lending rates.

Central bank policy operates first through financial markets and then through banks as they adjust their interest rates. This chapter discusses the transmission of policy in this first step of the monetary transmission mechanism, known as interest-rate pass-through. Historically, the focus of attention has been the interest-rate channel. We show the origins of this channel via a microfounded model of interest-rate setting by deposit-taking institutions that are Cournot oligopolists facing adjustment costs. We then examine other channels such as the bank lending channel and the bank capital channel and the role of central bank communications, signaling, and forward guidance over future interest rates. Each is shown to influence the setting of current short-term interest rates. The chapter closes with some issues for the future of pass-through in the transmission process.

The Lehman Brothers event in 2008 created a large uncertainty shock that triggered an economic slowdown lasting a decade. The macroeconomic effects are well documented, but the effect on business decisions much less so. In this paper, we explore corporate data to investigate how economic uncertainty affected investment, dividend payouts and cash holdings, based on over 10,000 UK firm-year observations. We offer new insights into the relationship between business decisions and uncertainty, by exploiting two surveys of macroeconomic uncertainty from professional forecasters and CFOs collected by the Bank of England. These data demonstrate that heightened economic uncertainty lowered investment even after controlling for investment opportunities, sales growth, and the firm’s own stock volatility. Economic uncertainty also explains the rise in cash holdings and the fall in payouts. Hence, our results help explain why UK firms invested so little and held so much cash at a time of historically low interest rates, and also why they paid out smaller dividends. These results may help explain recent sluggish productivity in the UK economy, and they also are important, because they provide a benchmark for future studies of Brexit-related uncertainty.

Large deficits have opened up on defined benefit pension schemes in the United Kingdom since 2007, and at the same time investment expenditure has been subdued; this is a common phenomenon in other countries too. We use privileged access to a unique new data set from The Pensions Regulator and two identification schemes to investigate the effects of deficits and deficit recovery plans on UK companies’ dividends, investment, wages and cash holdings. Identification is based on the close relationship between low long-term interest rates and pension deficits; and the external regulation of pension schemes by The Pensions Regulator. We show that firms with larger pension deficits voluntarily pay lower dividends, but they do not invest less. However, firms that are required to make deficit recovery contributions by the regulator have lower dividend and investment expenditure compared to other firms, and more so if they are financially constrained. These effects are large for some individual companies, but macroeconomically small compared to the stimulus offered by the Bank of England’s quantitative easing policy.

The importance of truncated distributions for bias in estimation is demonstrated for a Japanese policy reaction function. Due to the proximity of a zero lower bound (ZLB) on interest rates, coefficient estimates can be biased upwards. This paper illustrates the importance of measuring and correcting estimates for this bias using Japan's unique experience of prolonged low inflation/deflation.

This paper offers a new approach that estimates the response of interest rates to inflation and the output gap at various points (quantiles) on the conditional distribution of interest rates. This offers an improvement on empirical estimates conducted only at the mean and also allows us to test the propositions that policy shows greater aggression to inflation in the reaction function in terms of a greater response coefficient as interest rates reach low levels, and increasing aggression as the lower bound is approached. We find support for the Taylor principle, a more aggressive response to inflation than under a Taylor rule, but no detectable evidence of increasing aggression as the zero lower bound is approached in the US and Japan.

This paper provides non-parametric tests of the correspondence between the ‘words’ on price stability from the ECB President's statement and future interest rate changes. It also indicates the commonality of the signal between these indicators of pressure on price stability.

Making accurate forecasts of the future direction of interest rates is a vital element when making economic decisions. The focus on central banks as they make decisions about the future direction of interest rates requires the forecaster to assess the likely outcome of committee decisions based on new information since the previous meeting. We characterize this process as a dynamic ordered probit process that uses information to decide between three possible outcomes for interest rates: an increase, decrease or no-change. When we analyze the predictive ability of two information sets, we find that the approach has predictive ability both in-sample and out-of-sample that helps forecast the direction of future rates.

This paper examines firms’ access to bank and market finance when allowance is made for differences in firm-specific characteristics. A theoretical model determines the characteristics such as size, risk and debt that would determine firms’ access to bank or market finance; these characteristics can result in greater (or lesser) tightening of credit when interest rates increase. An empirical evaluation of the predictions of the model is conducted on a large panel of UK manufacturing firms. We confirm that small, young and risky firms are more significantly affected by tight monetary conditions than large, old and secure firms.

Official interest rate changes should influence short rates on money market instruments and retail products, such as deposit accounts and mortgages, but complete pass-through is often taken for granted. This paper provides a theoretical and econometric framework for assessing the evidence for this assumption using seventeen years of monthly data for rates on thirteen deposit and mortgage products offered by individual UK financial institutions. The methodology allows for asymmetries and non-linearities in adjustment and the results show that the speed of adjustment in retail rates depends on whether the perceived 'gap' between retail and base rates is widening or narrowing.

The determination of long-run aggregate supply is a feature which short-run models of macroeconomic policy coordination tend to neglect but which has implications for the setting of interest rates. In this paper, the authors develop an open-economy model of output maximization, where investment and capital flows are crucial determinants of output and are in turn influenced by interest rate policy and credible control of inflation. The model represents an extension to short-run models of government policy-making and emphasizes that coordination of relative interest rates is as important as control of inflation. Copyright 1997 by Royal Economic Society.

In this paper we argue that banks anticipate short-term market rates when setting interest rates on loans and deposits. In order to include anticipated rates in an empirical model, we use two methods to forecast market rates - a level, slope, curvature model and a principal components model - before including them in a model of retail rate adjustment for four retail rates in four major euro area economies. Using both aggregate data and data from individual French banks, we find a significant role for forecasts of market rates in determining retail rates; alternative specifications with futures information yield comparable results.

Much of the literature on interest rate pass through assumes banks set retail rates by observing current market rates. We argue instead that banks anticipate the direction of short-term market rates when setting interest rates on loans, mortgages and deposits. If anticipated rates - captured by forecasts of short-term interest rates or future markets - are important, the empirical specifications of many previous studies that omit them could be misspecified. Including such forecasts requires a detailed consideration of the information in the yield curve and alternative forecasting models. In this paper we use two methods to extract anticipated changes to short-term market rates - a level, slope, curvature model and a principal components model - at many horizons, before including them in a model of retail rate adjustment for four interest rates in four major euro area economies. We find a significant role for forecasts of market rates in determining interest rate pass through; alternative specifications with futures information yield comparable results. We conclude that it is important to include anticipated changes in market rates to avoid misspecification in pass through estimation.

This paper examines the impact of the dramatic reduction in interest rates by the Federal Reserve on Hong Kong. Using a panel of several hundred firms in Hong Kong we find that firms increase all types of debt, but shift from short-term to long-term debt as rates fall. This can be attributed in part to a supply-side effect as the benign monetary policy environment has improved creditworthiness. The most noticeable result from our analysis is the high level of bank dependence among Hong Kong firms and the continued dependence on bank finance even when interest rates fall. Potentially this may reveal that Hong Kong lacks the benefits of a deep domestic bond market.

Official interest rate changes are intended to influence short rates on money market instruments and retail products, such as deposit accounts and mortgages, and complete pass-through is often simply taken for granted. This paper provides a theoretical and econometric framework for assessing the evidence for this assumption using 14 years of monthly data for interest rates on deposit and mortgage products offered by UK banks and building societies. The method employed allows for asymmetries and non-linearities in adjustment and the results show that the speed of adjustment in retail rates depends on whether the perceived 'gap' between retail and base rates is widening or narrowing.

This paper reports estimates of an econometric model of the determinants of OFCs' broad money holding and M4 lending to OFCs. This is of interest as it gives information about a component of UK money and credit aggregates, and also because it provides some evidence of the link between financial activity and growth of the real economy. The long-run equilibria for money holding and lending to this sector are modelled as being driven by GDP, wealth, the return to financial services and various interest rate spreads. The dynamics of OFCs' money and lending are shown to be interdependent. The evidence for interactions between OFCs and other sectors are then considered. The results indicate that M4 lending to OFCs is significantly related to aggregate investment in the long run, but is largely unrelated to the spending of households.