Monetary Transmission Mechanism and Banking Sector: The Case of Turkey

Abstract

Changes in the financial and economic structure have put banks, particularly credit, at the center of economic policies in Türkiye over the last two decades. This dissertation examines the linkage between monetary transmission and the banking sector for the Turkish economy, covering the period between 2003 and 2021. The first chapter investigates the money-output and credit-output relationships using the time-varying Granger causality framework. The research finds a causal link between money and output with temporal variations. Accordingly, it suggests that money has a predictive content for output in the pre-global financial crisis period (GFC). However, the causal relationship between money and output disappears after 2015. On the other hand, while the results do not indicate any causality from the credit to output in the pre-GFC period, they identify several causal episodes in the post-GFC period. The study also clarifies that the credit-output linkage in the Turkish economy has weakened after 2015. The such result points out the importance of selective credit policies. The findings also suggest that money has no predictive power for output during economic downturns, while credit is somewhat predictive, except for the GFC. The second chapter analyzes the interest rate pass-through to the deposit and lending rates using a time-varying parameter VAR methodology. The results reveal that the pass-through is incomplete and time-varying. Furthermore, the changes in policy rates are mostly transmitted to the bank rates within one month. The empirical evidence also shows a more robust and stable pass-through for the deposit rates than the lending rates. However, the responses of lending rates to the policy rate appear to be more volatile between 2014 and 2021. Finally, the results suggest heterogeneity across loan rate responses. Accordingly, pass-through is found to be the fastest and highest for commercial loans and the slowest and weakest for housing loans.