Sectoral Comovement, Monetary Policy and the Credit Channel

Using a structural vector autoregression, we document that a contractionary monetary policy shock triggers a decline in durable and non-durable outputs as well as a contraction in bank equity and a rise in the excess bond premium. The latter points to an important transmission channel of monetary policy via financial markets. It has long been recognized that a standard two-sector New Keynesian model, where durable goods prices are flexible and non-durable and services sticky, does not generate the empirically observed sectoral comovement across expenditure categories in response to a monetary policy shock. We show that introducing financial frictions in a two-sector New Keynesian model can resolve its disconnect with the empirical evidence: a monetary tightening generates not only comovement, but also a rise in credit spreads and a deterioration in bank equity.