Taking Stock: A Critical Review of Recent
Research on Monetary Policy
Transmission Mechanism
Zakaria Bahari
ABSTRACT
The classical and more recent literatures on the transmission
of
monetary policy on economic performance offer a wide range of issues. Among the
issues are; the potential roles of financial intermediaries in economic growth,
the transmission of monetary policy to real variables, and the choices of
financial indicators. The last two issues, in providing financial services, the
financial intermediaries contribute to the
economic growth by transmitting monetary policy to real variables as well as
becoming important financial indicators. Several studies find that the debt
financing is important to firms, particularly for financing investment of new
project and to expand the current business activities. The question arises on
how the monetary policy affect the firm behaviour? We will show that there are
two complementary ways of explaining about how firm might be influenced by the
changes of monetary policy. First, the balance sheet channel is identified
whereby the condition of firm’s balance sheets is a source of output
fluctuations. Second, the bank
lending channel that stresses the ability of monetary policy to regulate the
pool of funds available to the bank-dependent firms. This paper provides the
investigation of those issue.
Keywords: monetary policy; debt; transmission mechanism; balance sheet channel; bank lending channel