Uneven effects of monetary policy: Sectoral disparities in credit card spending

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of monetary policy on the credit card spending on different sectors. The investigation is based on a structural vector autoregression model, where sector-specific real credit card spending data (adjusted for inflation) representing an overall country, Türkiye, are used. The empirical results (in the long run) suggest that a positive shock to the monetary policy rate reduces real credit card spending in cars, health, insurance, and shopping in a statistically significant way, whereas it increases real credit card spending on airlines and travel. Monetary policy shocks contribute to the volatility of credit card spending by up to 36% for insurance, 26% for markets and shopping centers, and 22% for travel sectors, whereas this contribution is only about 3% for contractor services and about 4% for car rentals, jewelry, and casino sectors. It is implied that there are uneven effects of monetary policy across sector-specific credit card spendings. These results are robust to the consideration of changes in unemployment rate, inflation rate, nominal effective exchange rate, and the number of credit card transactions as well as alternative model specifications with different numbers of lags, different variables, and different estimation strategies. Important suggestions follow for monetary, fiscal, and macroprudential policies to mitigate the uneven effects of monetary policy across sectors.