Banks and Monetary Shocks in Emerging Markets; How Far Can We Go with the "Credit View"?

This paper examines the propagation of monetary shocks in a two-good optimizing macromodel where domestic banking activity is costly and the non-tradable sector is highly dependent on domestic bank credit, as in most emerging market economies. The model develops the Bernanke-Blinder “credit view” of the monetary transmission mechanism along classical lines, with no Keynesian rigidities being imposed and the only sources of “imperfection” arising from deposit and credit-in-advance constraints. Using numerical simulations, we show that such a relatively simple model goes a long way toward explaining some key “stylized facts” of recent financial crises.