The Channel of Monetary Transmission to Demand: Evidence from the Market for Automobile Credit
研究紧缩货币政策如何通过银行信贷渠道影响消费，利用汽车融资数据发现银行消费贷款减少导致实际消费下降，但总体经济影响较小。
In response to tight money, both consumer loans and consumption fall. The author asks whether there is any causality running from loans to consumption by focusing on how the composition of automobile finance between bank and nonbank sources of credit changes in response to unanticipated innovations in monetary policy. The results indicate that contractionary monetary policy produces a statistically significant reduction in the relative supply of bank consumer loans, which in turn produces a decline in real consumption. The evidence therefore supports the existence of a credit channel of monetary transmission to aggregate consumption. Moreover, the nature of automobile finance is uniquely suited to identifying which of two possible sub-channels of the broader credit channel is relatively more important, and suggests the results are more likely consistent with a bank lending channel than with a pure balance sheet channel. However, the findings also indicate that the quantitative effects of the lending channel on the aggregate economy, though precisely estimated, may be quite small.