Abstract
Abstract This article aims to empirically study the impact of monetary policy on the loan portfolio of commercial banks. We estimate the vector autoregression model (VAR Model), which includes four variables, i.e., industrial production index, real exchange rate, M2, and the loan components of commercial banks. To identify the structural impact, we follow Blanchard and Quah (1989) approach and impose the long-run restrictions on the coefficients of the moving average representation to identify the monetary shock, aggregate demand shock, and aggregate supply shock. We find that in the short run both business and personal loans significantly decline in response to a monetary tightening. However, there is a contrast between the response in the proportions of secured and unsecured loans to a monetary tightening: the unsecured loans, such as consumer loans and business revolving loans, fall, while the secured loans, such as personal housing loans and business investment loans, rise. The response in the loan components to a monetary tightening implies that the information asymmetric between lenders and borrowers and a rise in the financial cost of intermediation after a monetary tightening causes a flight to quality in the loans of commercial banks. Keywords: Monetary transmission mechanism, Loan portfolio, Cost of intermediation.