E43 - Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and EffectsReturn

We assess the impact of ECB monetary policy on global aggregate and sectoral commodity prices over 2001–2019. We employ a SVAR model and separately assess periods before and after the global financial crisis. Our key results indicate that contractionary monetary policy shocks have positive effects on commodity prices during both conventional and unconventional monetary policy periods, indicating the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policy tools. The largest impact is documented on fuel and food commodities. Our results also suggest that the effect of ECB monetary policy on commodity prices transmits through the exchange rate channel, which influences European market demand.

Non-Maturing Deposit (NMD) pass-through rate represents a key parameter needed in the process of interest rate management of the banking book (IRRBB). NMD interest rates for retail and corporate segments are usually not directly linked to the market interest rates, but depend rather on the bank’s marketing strategy, market competition, liquidity, and possibly on other factors. The ratio in which banks adjust their NMD interest rates to the changes of the interbank market interest rates is known as the NMD pass-through rate. The goal of this paper is to analyse the variability of NMD pass-through rates in the 19 Eurozone countries and identify their possible determinants. The pass-through rates are estimated using cointegration analysis based on datasets available from the ECB Statistical Data Warehouse and the results show significant variability between countries. To analyse the determinants of pass-through rates in the Eurozone, the rates are regressed on 9 aggregates of country-level banking sector including concentration, profitability, or funding. Out of the tested predictors, surprisingly only the ratio of Wholesale Funding to Liabilities proves to impact the pass-through rates significantly, with a positive sign, indicating that countries where banks rely more heavily on wholesale funding exhibit higher pass-through of the market interest rate changes to the NMD deposit rates.

The paper examines the impact of a low interest rate environment on banks’ credit risk measured by the non-performing loan (NPL)/total loans ratio. We analyse a unique sample of annual data on 823 banks from the Eurozone, Denmark, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland for the 2011-2017 period, which also covers the period of zero and negative rates. We conclude that after 1 year of low interest rates, the NPL ratio increases. Our results are mostly consistent with the findings of previous research, and the majority of differences can be explained by the changes in the economic environment during the period with low interest rates.