Monetary Policy Impulses and Retail Interest Rate Pass-Through in Asian Banking Markets

This paper considers the integration of financial markets and mutual influences of monetary policies in the USA and Asia based on monthly data from 1994 to 2007. We used panel-type and time-series and quantile panel-type error correction models to test the influences of expected and unexpected monetary policy impulses on the interest rate pass-through mechanism in the financial markets of 9 Asian countries and the USA. The empirics show that if interest rate integration exists in the financial markets, the following effects are observed: (i) positive impulses of unexpected monetary policy will lead to an increase in the long-run multiplier of the retail interest rate; (ii) the adjustment of retail interest rates with short-run disequilibrium will lead to an increase in the long-run markup; and (iii) the empirical results of quantile regression prove that when the interest variation is greater than the 0.5th quantile and unexpected monetary policy impulses are greater than the expected monetary policy impulses, the short-run interest rate pass-through mechanism becomes more unstable. Copyright 2010 The Author. Asian Economic Journal 2010 East Asian Economic Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.