Lending Rate Pass-through and Bank Heterogeneity in a High Interest Rate Environment: Evidence from Azerbaijan

I contribute to the ongoing policy discourse on the challenges of monetary policy transmission in environments with consolidated financial sectors and high credit rates. I empirically investigate the lending rate pass-through in Azerbaijan – a small resource-rich economy in transition – by taking advantage of a unique set of high-frequency bank-level data. My bottom-line policy message is the following. First, lending rates are considerably irresponsive to monetary policy shocks, and the interest rate channel ought to be somehow improved. Second, macroeconomic fundamentals and the concentrated bank sector are surprisingly not among the reasons behind the policy-market disconnect. Third, domestic commercial banks are able to exert substantial monopolistic pricing capacities and keep credit rates high, particularly when the central bank loosens its policy stance. Fourth, the underlying cause of both monetary policy inefficacy and high interest rate stickiness appears to be structural excess liquidity. In fact, empirical results show that pass-through is substantially higher for less liquid banks. Extraction of excess liquidity from the system should mitigate the banks’ monopolistic pricing powers, improve the efficiency of the interest rate channel, and ultimately bring the credit rates down.