Bank Coordination And Monetary Transmission: Evidence From India
Speaker(s) Shiv Dixit, Indian School of Business Publication Online
ABSTRACT

We propose a new channel for the transmission of monetary policy shocks, the coordination channel. We develop a New Keynesian model in which bank lending is strategically complementary. Banks do not observe the distribution of loans but infer it using Gaussian signals. Under this paradigm, we find that expectations of tighter credit conditions reduce interest rate pass-through, which dampens transmission to inflation and output. We test these predictions by constructing a dataset that links the evolution of interest rates to firms' bank credit relationships in India. Consistent with our model, we find that the cross-sectional mean and dispersion of lending rates, which capture the expected value and the precision of the signals of credit extended by other banks, are significant predictors of monetary transmission. Our quantitative results suggest that coordination failures amongst banks reduce monetary transmission by about a third.