Central Bank Review最新文献

This paper examines the effect of financial literacy level on cash holdings in Turkey. Utilizing the Methods of Payment Survey, which includes both financial literacy and cash-related data, we first investigate the fundamentals of financial literacy in Turkey. Based on the performance on financial literacy questions, we categorize respondents into three groups. Subsequently, we analyze how cash holding behavior differs among financial literacy groups. Our results reveal that financially literate respondents tend to hold less cash on hand and store more cash elsewhere. Moreover, card ownership increases through financial literacy and the change in payment behavior of financially literate respondents is more significant during Covid-19 pandemic. The results imply that promoting financial literacy may result in less cash usage at points of sale accompanied by the currency in circulation growth, due to the overwhelming effect of increased non-transactional demand following a positive change in financial literacy level.

Using an extensive firm-level database that combines balance sheet information, social security registry and customs data, we examine whether the relationship between the exchange rate and exports change with the degree of labor-intensity of production. The results based on manufacturing firms in Türkiye suggest that the sensitivity of labor-intensive firms to the exchange rate is higher than that of the less labor-intensive ones, both at the intensive and extensive margins of exports. In addition, export product variety and export market variety of the labor-intensive firms increase more than the others during a currency depreciation. In particular, the increase in the exports of the labor-intensive firms is 2.7 percent higher than the increase in exports of the non-labor-intensive firms in case of a 10 percent decline in the real effective exchange rate. However, we do not find a significant impact on the export prices varying across the labor-intensity of the firms. Our results are robust to alternative definitions of labor-intensity and exchange rates, and the use of different time spans.

This article investigates consolidation and restructuring in the banking sector in Nepal that was induced by regulatory intervention in recent years. We compare the financial performance of the overall commercial banking sector and selected commercial banks on an individual basis before and after the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) policy intervention. The research employs an analysis of the financial ratios (profitability, liquidity, leverage, and wealth of shareholders ratios) before and after mergers that took place between 2013 and 2020 on a sample of seven Nepalese commercial banks. Hypotheses are tested using a paired sample t-test to measure any significant difference between the pre- and post-merger situations of the acquiring banks’ financial metrics. The findings indicate that the overall commercial banking sector significantly improved their liquidity and leverage ratios in the post-merger period. Other measures, such as the profitability and shareholder wealth ratios showed either mixed or insignificant results after the M&A. The results for selected commercial banks on an individual basis were even less conclusive and mixed. While some banks showed improvement in financial ratios, other results were insignificant.

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between different loan types and the current account balance along with its sub-components. Our empirical results suggest that a rise in total loans inevitably leads to a deterioration in the current account balance. This relationship is preserved in the case of the goods trade balance, but it becomes statistically insignificant and disappears if the services trade balance is considered. When we examine different types of loans, our findings indicate that both consumer and corporate loans have sizeable and negative effect on both the current account and goods trade balances with the impact of consumer loans being much higher. We also report that only corporate loans have a significantly negative relationship with the services trade balance although the concurrent effect is rather small.

This paper is motivated by the implementation of the new banking supervision structure in the European Union (EU) and the possible conflict of interest between monetary policy and the supervision authority within the European Central Bank (ECB). The empirical analysis considers the relationship between the structure of banking supervision and the compliance with the Basel Core Principles (BCP) for effective supervision. A sample of 21 countries and the Euro Area (EA) is used. In addition to the structure of bank supervision, a list of independent variables is considered to explain the dependent variable. The results suggest that the supervisory structure has no statistical significance at any notable significance level on compliance with the BCP. On the contrary, financial freedom is a statistically significant variable.

We construct an empirical test of whether the anticipation of adoption of inflation targeting affects the inflation rate. We observe that most of the central banks adopt the regime after first achieving significant disinflation. With pre-inflation-targeting-disinflation, initial targets are met with success and the new regime gains credibility. Working with data for 114 emerging market, advanced and low-income economies, we identify the effect using forward-looking dynamic panel data models in a difference-in-difference framework. We find that inflation targeting is successful in locking-in already low inflation rather than reducing high inflation. The analysis has important implications for central banks looking forward to adoption of inflation targeting.

Using a Monte Carlo method and quarterly data from the 2019 Household Expenditure and Income Survey, we examine the resilience of urban and rural households to various shocks, including exchange rate change, changes in asset prices, job losses, and decline in income. Based on the exposure at default (EAD) estimates, the largest impact was observed in the case of an income shock. The EAD values ranged from 0.38 to 0.43 compared to a baseline case of 0.35. The latter indicates that about one-third of the debt held by households may be problematic, especially in rural areas. The second largest impact is seen for a major currency devaluation, followed by the rise in unemployment. In addition, the breakdown of these results by income shows that households in the lower income quartiles are more vulnerable. Potential implications are discussed.

The design of pension schemes is crucial in determining savings behavior. The impact of pension schemes on saving rates across countries remains to be an intriguing empirical question considering the complicated nature of the relationship between saving patterns and pension wealth. This paper investigates the effect of the private pension contributions on savings rates in 25 selected OECD countries between the period 2001–2019 by employing quantile regression analysis which takes the heterogeneity of the data into account and provides information about not only the midpoint but also the extreme points of the distribution. According to the results, the savings rate is negatively associated with private pensions at all quantile levels. The empirical findings indicate that pension contributions tend to be strong substitutes for voluntary savings in countries with low tendencies to save. This result is especially important for its policy design implications as the policy makers tend to provide incentives either in the form of tax reliefs or direct substitutions for private pension contributions with the motivation to raise domestic savings.

Do extreme events have a significant effect about textual sentiment? The purpose of this article is to highlight the need to correct the estimation of indicators of economic uncertainty. The indicators were constructed from textual data about the perspective of extreme events. For this purpose, based on data extracted from the minutes of mee-tings of the Monetary Policy of eighteen Central Banks, we estimated two variables of perception of economic uncertainty: the first using only a traditional sentiment dictio-nary and the second incorporating terms associated with the extreme event (COVID- 19 Pandemic) in its word list. Initial results show that there is a significant effect of COVID-19 on the estimation of the perception of economic uncertainty; this effect acts as an accelerator that potentiates its impact. It was evident that incorporating conjunctural issues - be it local or global - is indispensable when performing sentiment analysis in texts during extreme events. Moreover, failing to take conjunctural issues into account throughout the estimation process can result in variables with biased in-formation.

This study investigates the role of sectoral market structure in the inflationary dynamics of the domestic producer prices (D-PPI) in Türkiye. We start by reporting the fact that industries with intense competition had lower producer price inflation compared to industries with low-competition in the past few years. Further investigation shows that this differentiation across industries corresponds to the years with higher exchange rate volatility. The industries characterized with low-competition have higher annual producer price inflation on average than those that are characterized with high-competition especially during the periods of high exchange rate volatility. Results are robust to a wide set of additional specifications and cast light on the role of market structure on firms’ pricing behavior in Türkiye.