The Dynamic Effects of Interest Rates and Reserve Requirements

This paper quantifies the dynamic macroeconomic effects derived from both; shocks to conventional monetary policy and shocks to reserve requirement ratios applied to bank deposits in Peru. The analysis tackles reserve requirements on domestic as well as foreign currency deposits. Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) models are identified through a mixture of zero and sign restrictions for the period 1995-2013. Contractionary monetary policy shocks generate a negative effect on aggregate credit and a positive effect on bank spreads between loan and deposit rates. Likewise, shocks to the two reserve requirement ratios produce a negative effect on aggregate credit in their corresponding currencies and a mild effect on both aggregate real economic activity and the price level. We consider possible mechanisms that may help explain the dynamic effects uncovered in the paper.