Asymmetries in the interest rate channel in inflation-targeting Latin American countries

Abstract

This paper presents, first, a theoretical model that, by highlighting that commercial banks with market power are able to positively pass on to their clients variations in their costs and, furthermore, that the strength with which they can do so is in turn asymmetrically related to the elasticity of the demand for loans exhibited by those clients, explains the asymmetric empirical findings shortly described. Secondly, it empirically investigates the pass-through of monetary policy rates (MPR) changes into the consumer and commercial loans interest rates set by commercial banks in four Latin American countries with inflation targeting (IT) schemes, namely (in alphabetic order) Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru, over a homogeneous period. To do so, it estimates Non-Linear Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) models for each country. Then, we find two types of important asymmetric responses in the interest rate channel of IT monetary policy. The first is that the long-run response of the consumer loans interest rates following increases in the MPR is greater than that of the commercial loans interest rates. The second is that, in general, when the demand is relatively more elastic (as in the case of commercial loans) then the banks interest rates tend to exhibit a greater response when the central bank lowers the MPR than when it raises it.