Market Power, Bank Funding, and the Transmission of the Monetary Policy to Bank Lending and Profitability - Ece Özge Emeksiz

Abstract: This paper analyzes how bank market power affects monetary policy transmission to bank funding dynamics, lending, and profitability. First, I document variations in banks' exposure to the monetary policy via spreads on deposits, wholesale funding, and lending, and that bank market power is a strong predictor of the degree of exposure. Specifically, I show that after an increase in the policy rate, banks with higher market power adjust their deposit and loan rates relatively less, offsetting the fall in their deposit inflows through cheaper access to wholesale funding. This dampens the effect of contractionary monetary policy on their lending and profitability. That is, I present unified evidence on monetary pass-through to the U.S. commercial banks by comprehensively studying the interactions among the deposit, wholesale funding, and credit markets which is missing in the literature. Third, I show that bank market power has implications for monetary policy transmission to the real economy through its impact on bank-level lending. In particular, aggregate lending and employment decrease less in areas served by banks with higher market power following monetary contraction. Finally, I rationalize my empirical findings by building a theoretical model with monopolistic competition where market power generates imperfect pass-through of monetary policy.