Bank heterogeneity in interest rate pass-through: A panel evidence of Pakistan

This article examines the role of bank-level characteristics in determining the nature of interest rate pass-through from monetary policy rates to commercial banks’ lending rates in Pakistan. Several bank-level factors, namely market size, liquidity, capitalisation, profitability, and competition level, were used in analysing the pass-through mechanism. This study utilised a dynamic heterogeneous panel technique, namely the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimation for the sample of 12 private commercial banks, over the time span 2003:Q2 to 2015:Q4. Banks of smaller size, large capital, and higher liquidity were significantly affecting the interest rate pass-through procedure. Thus, to improve monetary policy’s transmission mechanism, Pakistan’s central bank should limit bank capitalisation and draw out excess liquidity from the banking sector.

Searching for the Peak Google Trends and the COVID-19 Outbreak in Italy

One of the difficulties faced by policy makers during the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy was the monitoring of the virus diffusion. Due to changes in the criteria and insufficient resources to test all suspected cases, the number of ‘confirmed infected’ rapidly proved to be unreliably reported by official statistics. We explore the possibility of using information obtained from Google Trends to predict the evolution of the epidemic. Following the most recent developments on the statistical analysis of longitudinal data, we estimate a dynamic heterogeneous panel. This approach allows to takes into account the presence of common shocks and unobserved components in the error term both likely to occur in this context. We find that Google queries contain useful information to predict number patients admitted to the intensive care units, number of deaths and excess mortality in Italian regions.

Inflation Dynamics, Globalization and Monetary Policy: Empirical Evidence from Selected South and Southeast Asian Countries

The present study investigated the impact of monetary policy and globalization on inflation. The study utilized an updated measure of globalization along with two other dimensions i.e., de facto and de jure measure of globalization to examine the nature of the globalization-inflation relationship. It measures the impact of monetary policy variables on inflation, ignoring random shocks as these are considered minor fractions for the inconsistency of the policy instruments. The study also used the Hodrick Prescott filter to calculate the domestic output gap to assess the notion that the changes in the domestic output gap are still relevant to inflation variations in the presence of globalization. Structural modeling of dynamic heterogeneous panel data estimation technique, which accounts for endogeneity and serial correlation issues has also been employed. The results of the study confirm that both global and domestic factors have significant and descriptive power for domestic inflation. Furthermore, the interest rate is found to be a major nominal anchor to affect inflation. The results of panel causality showed that there exists bidirectional causality from inflation to interest rate, while mixed results were found for analyzing monetary aggregates, exchange rate, globalization, and domestic output gap relationships.