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| Do Innovative Lending Facilities Affect Bank Loan Interest Rates？ |
| DENG Wei, SONG Min, LIU Min
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School of Accounting, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law;
Economics and Management School, Wuhan University |
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Abstract In the past few years, the People's Bank of China (PBC) has created a series of lending facility tools represented by mid-term lending facility (MLF) tools to help guide commercial banks to reduce their financing costs and promote high-quality economic development. Compared to the lending facility tools introduced by the Federal Reserve and other central banks during the crisis, the MLFs are intended as normal monetary policy tools rather than temporary rescue tools. The MLFs are designed to provide base money to commercial banks, support the proper growth of credit, and the reduction of commercial bank loan interest rates.
Due to a lack of suitable causality identification strategies, it remains controversial whether lending facility tools have an effective impact on the interest rates of commercial bank loans. In particular, in China, where a variety of monetary policy tools coexist, the complex effects of different monetary policy tools affect and overlap with each other. This complexity presents difficulties for the study of the policy effects of lending facility tools. So far, empirical research on the impact of China's lending facility tools on bank loan interest rates remains rare. Based on the quasi-natural experiment created by the introduction of MLFs by the PBC, this paper uses hand-collected data from the 2009 to 2017 annual reports of 100 commercial banks to conduct an empirical study of whether China's lending facilities have an effective impact on commercial bank loan interest rates. The main conclusions of this paper are as follows. First, after the creation of the MLFs, the greater the eligible collateral held by commercial banks, the lower the interest rates of their loans. This effect increases over the studied period, showing that lending facilities can significantly affect commercial bank loan interest rates and have an increasing policy effect over time. Second, the PBC’s MLF operation expands the amount of borrowing from the PBC and the lending provided by commercial banks. This increased lending effectively reduces commercial bank loan interest rates, showing that the MLF tools work through the channel of eligible commercial bank collateral.
The contributions of this paper are as follows. First, by using hand-collected eligible collateral data from commercial banks, this paper demonstrates the transmission mechanism by which MLFs affect bank loan rates. Previous empirical studies of the impacts of lending facility tools in China do not consider the eligible collateral of commercial banks or demonstrate how lending facilities exert their policy effects through such banks. Given that China's lending facilities have required that participating commercial banks provide eligible collateral, our use of hand-collected eligible collateral data provides original micro-level evidence that the MLFs work through the collateral channel. Second, by studying the policy effects of the MLF tools from the perspective of commercial bank loan interest rates, this paper verifies the effectiveness of the MLFs, thereby enriching the literature. Our results show that the PBC can effectively decrease commercial bank interest rates by using lending facilities to provide large-scale, low-cost funds to commercial banks, and that the effects are enhanced over time.
The findings of this paper have implications for collateral management in China's monetary policy and its implementation of lending facilities. First, the PBC can use lending facilities to influence commercial bank loan interest rates by adjusting lending facility scales, interest rates, and eligible collateral ranges. The PBC’s lending facilities help improve the formation mechanism of the loan prime rate (LPR) formation mechanism and reduce social financing costs.Second,The MLF is a hybrid monetary policy tool that is both quantitative and price based. In practice, the PBC mainly operates the MLF by adjusting its size. In contrast, the MLF’s interest rate has undergone small changes, with an overall downward trend. As a result, the extent to which the MLF interest rate affects commercial bank loan interest rates is unclear. Therefore, to improve the effectiveness of China's lending facilities, it is important to further explore how the policy effects of the MLF’s functional mechanisms are affected by different scales of operation and lending facility interest rates.
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Received: 27 October 2020
Published: 02 December 2021
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