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| Central Bank Communication and Bank Credit Allocation: Total and Structural Effects |
| WANG Yuwei, LIU Hongya
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Yangtze River Delta Economics and Social Development Research Center, Nanjing University;
School of Economics, Nanjing University |
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Abstract In recent years, expectation management tools, represented by words communication of central bank, are playing more and more important roles in guiding market expectations and behaviors. China's financial system is dominated by banks, so whether the expectations of banks and their behaviors in credit allocation can be well managed by words communication of central bank, is extremely crucial for improving the ability of financial sectors in serving the real economy and building a more effective monetary policy system. Currently, it's necessary for banks to pursue reasonable credit growth with balanced allocation in order to ensure the monetary policy to be flexible, moderate, precise, and effective. Can words communication of central bank achieve these goals and how it to achieve these？ There are few studies have given the explicit answers.
Based on the monetary policy report of the People's Bank of China and other relevant texts, we construct the words communication index, and use the data of 46 commercial banks in China from 2012 to 2021 to empirically study the impact of words communication on the credit allocation of commercial banks in terms of both the total and structural effects. The main findings are as follows: (1) The direction of words communication has a significant positive impact on the credit supply of commercial banks, and the effectiveness of words communication is affected by the efficiency of information transmission and the willingness and ability of banks to supply credit. (2) There is an asymmetrical effect on the influence of the words communication on the bank credit supply. More precisely, the influence of the words communication in the loose direction is stronger than it in the tight direction. (3) By analyzing samples from different industries, we find that the credit increment caused by loose communication mainly flowed into the government platforms and real estate, which failed to effectively support the development of the manufacturing industry; while the tight communication inhibited the credit flowing into the manufacturing sector and have little impact on the government platforms and real estate. (4) After the supply-side structural reform in financial sector in 2018, the structure of credit has been obviously improved and the ability of credit loans to serve the real economy has been significantly enhanced. The policy implications of this article are as follows: (1) The central bank should strengthen the words communication with market. Meanwhile, it's necessary to pay attention to the coordination of communication and action to improve the information transmission efficiency and to ensure the growth of credit supply. (2) According to the characteristics of different banks, the central bank should actively explore diversified communication frameworks to effectively improve the communication efficiency. (3) The supply-side structural reform in financial sector should be strengthened and the central bank needs to guide the bank credit to the real economy through various means in order to avoid the structural imbalance of the economy caused by the misallocation of financial resources.
The marginal contribution of this paper may be illustrated in the following aspects: First, most of the existing studies concentrate on the impact of words communication on the capital demand, but pay little attention to the credit supply. Studies on the capital demand side often focus on listed companies and fail to reflect the complete credit demand. Several studies have noted the important role of bank lending willingness, but have not explored it in depth. We establish a connection between words communication and bank credit behavior and enrich the related literature of expectation management on the credit supply side. Second, from the perspective of the characteristics of banks and their willingness and ability to extend credit, we discuss how to improve the efficiency of information transmission and provide an empirical evidence for how to improve the effectiveness of words communication. Third, we find an asymmetric effect of the words communication on bank credit and it shows heterogeneity in different industries. Specifically, in the fields of government platforms and real estate, words communication in loose direction is more effective, which is in sharp contrast to the manufacturing sector. This finding explains the mechanism of capital misallocation from the side of credit supply. Fourth, we confirm the positive role of the supply-side structural reform in financial sector in optimizing the credit structure and improving the ability of credit funds to serve the real economy, which has policy implications.
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Received: 15 March 2023
Published: 16 July 2024
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